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AUTUMN HOLIDAYS. 



BV THE SAME AUTHOR. 



THE RECREATIONS OF A COUNTRY PARSON. 
First Series. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

THE RECREATIONS OF A COUNTRY PARSON. 

Second Series. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

LEISURE HOURS IN TOWN. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. 

THE COMMONPLACE PHILOSOPHER IN TOWN 
AND COUNTRY. Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. 



THE GRAVER THOUGHTS OF A COUNTRY 
PARSON. Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. 

COUNSEL AND COMFORT SPOKEN FROM A CITY 
PULPIT. Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. 

/« the press. 

A SECOND VOLUME OF THE GRAVER THOUGHTS 
OF A COUNTRY PARSON. Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. 



LONDON 
NTED KV 5POTTISWOODE AND CO. 
NEW-STREET SQUARE 



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THE 



AUTUMN HOLIDAYS 



OF 



A COUNTRY PARSON 



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BY THE AUTHOR OF 
'THE RECREATIONS OF A COUNTRY PARSON 

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Ji ONGMIN, GeIEEF,L OWGMAlSr , 



CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

BY THE SEASIDE . I 

CHAPTER II. 

CONCERNING UNPRUNED TREES .... 22 

CHAPTER III. 

CONCERNING UGLY. DUCKS : BEING SOME THOUGHTS 

ON MISPLACED MEN 43 

CHAPTER IV. 

OF THE SUDDEN SWEETENING OF CERTAIN GRAPES . 67 

CHAPTER V. 

CONCERNING THE ESTIMATE OF HUMAN BEINGS 91 

CHAPTER VI. 

REMEMBRANCE . . . , II7 



VI Contents, 



CHAPTER VII. 

PAGE 

ON THE FOREST HILL: WITH SOME THOUGHTS 

TOUCHING DREAM-LIFE . . . 130 

CHAPTER VIII. 

r CONCERNING RESIGNATION I5I 

CHAPTER IX. 

A REMINISCENCE OF THE OLD TIME: BEING SOME 

THOUGHTS ON GOING AWAY . . -175 

CHAPTER X. 

CONCERNING OLD ENEMIES 208 

CHAPTER XL 

AT THE CASTLE: WITH SOME THOUGHTS ON MICHAEL 

SCOTT'S FAMILIAR SPIRIT 232 

CHAPTER XII. 

CONCERNING THE RIGHT TACK : WITH SOME 

THOUGHTS ON THE WRONG TACK . . .256 

CHAPTER XIII. 

CONCERNING NEEDLESS FEARS . . . 286 

CHAPTER XIV. 

BEATEN 307 



Contents, vii 



CHAPTER XV. 

PAGE 

GOSSIP 314 

CHAPTER XVI. 

CONCERNING CUTTING AND CARVING: WITH SOME 
THOUGHTS ON TAMPERING WITH THE COIN OF 
THE REALM 324 

CHAPTER XVII. 

FROM SATURDAY TO MONDAY 365 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

CONCERNING THINGS WHICH CANNOT GO ON . . 39 1 



CONCLUSION 415 



THE 

AUTUMN HOLIDAYS 

OF A 

COUNTRY PARSON. 

CHAPTER I. 

BY THE SEASIDE. 




E have been here a Httle more than a week, 
all of us together. For if you be a man of 
more than five-and-thirty years, and if you 
have a wife and children, you have doubtless found 
out that the true way to enjoy your autumn holi- 
days and to be the better for them, is not to go 
away by yourself to distant regions where you may 
climb snowy Alps and traverse glaciers, in the 
selfish enjoyment of new scenes and faces. These 
things must be left to younger men, who have not 
yet formed their home-ties ; and Avho know neither 
the happiness nor the anxieties of human beings 
who spread a large surface on any part of which 
fortune may hit hard and deep. Let us find a quiet 
place where parents and children may enjoy the 

B 



By the Seaside. 



time of rest in company : where you will be free 
from the apprehensions of evil which (unless you 
be a very selfish person) you will not escape when 
the little things are a thousand miles away. And 
to this end, one may well do without the sight of 
lakes, waterfalls, streets and churches, which it was 
pleasant once on a time to see. Upon this day last 
year, I ascended the marvellous spire of Strasburg 
Cathedral. It was the brightest of all bright days. 
You went up and up, by little stairs winding 
through a lace-work of stone, which it makes one 
somewhat nervous to think of even now, till you 
emerged on a platform whence you looked down 
dizzily on the market place hundreds of feet below; 
upon the town, all whose buildings looked so clean 
and well-defined in the smokeless air; upon the 
fertile level plain stretching away towards Baden ; 
and the ugly poplars marking the course of the 
Rhine. It was all, to an untravelled man and an 
enthusiastic lover of Gothic architecture, interesting 
beyond expression: yet I would much rather be here. 
For this is Saturday morning ; and my parish is 
far away. There is no sermon to be thought of for 
to-morrow ; and no multitude of sick folk to see : 
no pressure of manifold parochial cares. This is a 
very ugly cottage by a beautiful shore : and through 
a simple pecuniary negociation, the cottage is ours 
for the months of August and September. Looking 
up from this table and looking out of the window. 



By the Seaside. 



the first object you would see is a shaggy little 
fuchsia, covered with red flowers, waving about in 
a warm western wind. Beyond, there is a small 
expanse of green grass, in which I see, with en- 
tire composure, a good many weeds which would 
disquiet me much if the grass were my own. The 
little lawn is bounded by a wall of rough stone, 
half concealed by shrubs. And on the farther side, 
the top of the wall cutting sharp against it, welter- 
ing and toiling now in shadow, but a minute ago 
bright in sunshine with the unnumbered dimple of 
little waves, spreads the sea. Now it has brightened 
again : and three gleaming sails break the deep 
blue. Opposite, a few miles ofl", there are grand 
Highland hills. Sometimes they look purple: some- 
times light blue : sometimes the sunshine shows a 
yellow patch of corn-field. Never for more than 
an hour or two do those hills and this sea look 
the same. They are always changing : and the 
changes are extreme. You could no more tell a 
stranger what this place is like by describing it 
ever so accurately as it is at this moment, than you 
could worthily represent the most 'changeful human 
face by a single photograph. In the sunset, you 
may often see what will make you understand the 
imagery of the Revelation, a sea of glass mingled 
with fire : then the mountains are of a deep purple 
hue, such as you would think exaggerated if you 
saw it in a picture. ' Hardly have the crimson and 



By the Seaside. 



golden lights faded from the smooth water, when a 
great moon, nearly full, rises above the trees on this 
side, and casts a long golden path, flickering and 
heaving : the stillness is such that you fear to break 
it by a footfall. Then there have been times, even 
within this week, when drenching showers darkened 
the water and hid the opposite hills : or when white- 
crested waves made the sea into a wild ridgy plain, 
and broke on the shingle hard by in foam and 
thunder. 

This is not a fashionable watering-place : you go 
back to a quiet and simple life, coming here. No 
band of music plays upon the black wooden pier 
where the rare steamboat calls daily. There is no 
such thing as a gay promenade, frequented by 
brightly-dressed people desirous to see and to be 
seen. There is no reading room, no billiard room, 
no circulating library, no hotel, no people who let 
out boats, no drinking-fountain. There is a post 
office; but it is a mile distant. You would find 
here no more than a line of detached houses, a few 
extremely pretty, and more of them extremely 
ugly, reaching for somewhat more than a mile along 
the seashore. The houses, each with its shrubbery 
and lawn, greater or less, stand on a strip of level 
ground between the sea and a rocky wall of cliff, 
which follows the line of the beach at no great 
distance ; doubtless an ancient sea margin. But 
now it serves as a beautiful background to the 



By the Seaside. 5 

pretty houses, and it almost redeems the ugly ones : 
it is covered richly with trees, which through ages 
have rooted themselves in the crevices of the rock ; 
and where the perpendicular wall forbids that 
vegetation, it is clothed with ivy so luxuriant that 
you would hardly think those hearty leaves ever 
knew the blighting salt spray. By the seashore 
there runs a highway : the waves break within a few 
yards on a beach of rough shingly gravel. It is to 
be confessed that this charming place lacks the 
level sand which the ebbing tide leaves for a firm 
cool walking space at some time of every day. But 
your walks are not confined to the path to right 
and left along the seashore. You will discover 
pleasant ways, that lead to the country above the 
wooded and ivied cliff: and there you will find 
ripening harvest fields, and paths that wind through 
fragrant woods of birch, oak and pine, and here 
and there the mountain ash, with its glowing scarlet 
berries. But it is not what one understands by a 
country side : the whole landscape is gradually but 
constantly sloping upwards, till it passes into dark 
heathery hills, solitary as Tadmor in the wilderness. 
There the sportsman goes in search of grouse and 
deer; and thence you have views of the level blue 
water far below you, that are worth going many 
miles to see. 

There are places along this seaside where your 
only walk is beside the sea. The hills rise almost 



By the Seaside. 



from the water, an expanse of shadeless heather. 
But we are happier, with our shady woodland 
walks. When the glare and heat are oppressive 
along the shore in the vacant afternoon, let us turn 
away from the road that skirts the beach, up this 
thickly-wooded glen, through which a stream brawls 
from rock to rock, hardly seen for the leaves. You 
will not walk for a few yards under the pleasant 
shadow, till you find yourself so environed with ivy- 
grown trees, honeysuckle and wild flowers, that 
you might fancy the sea many miles off. And the 
oppressive light and heat and dust are gone. Let 
us go on, following the windings of the path and 
the water, till we reach a spot vv^here a clear little 
brook, tumbling over rocks from far above us, 
crosses the road under a rude arch, to join the 
larger stream : and now let us sit down on a great 
stone, where the little brook, close by our feet, 
makes a leap into the dark entrance of the bridge. 
Here let us rest and be thankful. Many people 
find this a feverish world : let us rejoice in a nook 
so green and quiet. Ferns of many kinds cover the 
damp rocks : there is a thick canopy of green leaves 
overhead, through which you may see blinks of the 
brightest blue sky ; and through which you may see 
an intense flickering of light, where the sun is 
struggling to pierce the dense shade. The air is 
fragrant and cool and moist : all around there is a 
thicket of evergreens and underwood, over which 



By the Seaside. 



the tall trunks arise whose spreading branches 
make our grateful shadow. 

We have all, young and old, wearied for this 
time : and here it is at last. The cheerful antici- 
pation of it was something to help one through 
laborious summer days. For if you are to be in 
the country no more than two months in the year, 
the months beyond question should be August and 
September. Let us keep our cake as long as we 
can : let us make our holiday season late. June and 
July are delightful months amid rural scenes : but 
it would be dismal to go back to the hot town at 
the end of July and think one had settled down for 
the winter. But at the beginning of October, a 
little space of long dark evenings, and the growing 
crispness of the morning air, help to make one feel 
ready to take with good heart to the labouring oar 
again. 

Yet, though this holiday-time be so enjoyed by 
anticipation, I think that when the day comes on 
which you preach to your own congregation for the 
last time before leaving, you feel it rather a trial. 
And you turn your back upon your church with some 
regret and some misgiving. A clergyman's work is 
not like any other : you have not quite the school- 
boy's feeling when working days are over and 
holidays begin. For your work is not merely your 
duty : it is your happiness too. And though some 
folk may not understand it, you feel it something 



By the Seaside. 



of a privation to think on a Sunday in your play- 
time that the bells are ringing, and the people 
assembling in the familiar place ; and you not there. 
Happily, there are regions in this world where the 
clergyman's last Sunday at church, is likewise the 
last Sunday at church of a great part of the con- 
gregation. // is gathered, as usual, one day : and 
the next, scattered far and wide, by the seaside and 
among the hills. And in this uncertain world, 
where when many hundreds of human beings are in 
one place to-day, no one can say who may be 
missing when they meet after some weeks separa- 
tion, I think that you, my friend, will preach with 
special kindliness and heartiness on your last 
Sunday at home ; and that you will be heard with 
special attention and sympathy. There will be a 
very perfect stillness as you pronounce the blessing 
for what may be the last time. And you will well 
remember the words and the music of the parting 
hymn. Taking your final look round your vestry, 
and round your emptied church, as you come away, 
you will feel the sorrow and anxiety which come of 
the vain delusion common to man, that the place 
where you worked and laboured your best, will not 
go on quite as well in your absence. Ah, my friend, 
some day you and I must leave our several churches 
for ever : and though we shall be kindly remem- 
bered and missed there for a while, they will come 
by and by to do without us. And very fit and 



By the Seaside. 



right too. We are not such seh^-conceited fools as 
to wish it were otherwise. Yet it is cheering, each 
Tuesday morning through the hohdays, when the 
letter comes by post, in which a kind friend, whom 
duty ties to his town work at this season, tells how 
all went well in the services of the Sunday before. 

Then, following that parting day, comes one of 
confusion and worry and fatigue : the day on which 
the family accomplishes the journey to the distant 
resting-place. Would that the age might come 
when human beings shall be able to do without 
baggage ! Yet even baggage serves good moral 
ends. You are very thankful indeed when in the 
quiet evening the cottage, or the more ambitious 
dwelling, is reached at last : and the manifold pack- 
ing-cases, being counted up, are found to be all right. 
During the day, several times, you had quite re- 
signed yourself to the conviction that half of them 
would never be found more. 

There are simple statements which may be re- 
peated many times, while yet no wise man will 
pull you up by declaring that he has heard the like 
before. For such simple statements are the irre- 
pressible outflow of the present happy mood and 
feeling. You could not help uttering such, to any 
one to whom you might be talking out your heart. 
Suffer me now to declare, that there is no more 
precious blessing than Rest. ' The end of work is 



lo By the Seaside. 



to enjoy rest.' ^The end and the reward of toil 
is rest.' Yes, it is delightful to rest for a while 
from even the most congenial and beloved work. 
And rest is not merely delightful : it is needful. 
The time comes, when the task drags heavily : when 
it is got through heartlessly, and by a painful effort 
often renewed. Most busy men, busied with work 
that wears the brain and nervous system, have some 
little time of rest in their daily round : some precious 
hour of quiet. There is generally the short breathing 
space between dinner and tea. But as months pass, 
the nerves grow so irritable that many sounds and 
circumstances worry you : then is the hour when 
the organ-grinder painfully thrills you through. At 
this stage, busy men find the relief of a little pause : 
a day or two away from work, no matter where. 
Arnold said that the most restful days of the year 
were those spent in the long journeys by coach 
between Rugby and Fox How. A very eminent 
and over-driven man lately told me, that when he is 
being Avrought into a fever, he finds rest by going 
to London by the express train, and returning the 
next day. The distance is four hundred miles going, 
and the like returning : eleven hours either way. 
But it is enjoyable to lean back in the carriage : to 
read and to muse : sure that no one will speak to 
him on the business of his profession. I have heard 
of a great man who found the like relief in going to 
bed for two days or so. There was physical repose : 



By the Seaside. 1 1 

and even the unreasonable caller and tormentor 
who would utterly disregard the assurance that the 
Doctor was weary and could see no one, was beaten 
by the assurance that the Doctor was in bed. For 
the average human being, on being told that the 
Doctor could see no one, would instantly sa}', ' Oh, 
but I know he will see ME ! ' But not even these 
retreats Avill stay the gathering weariness which 
grows on body and mind as the seasons pass. And 
if you have been at work from the beginning of 
October to the end of July, ten months with little 
relaxation, then you have fairly earned the autumn 
holiday-time. And your rest Avill be not merely 
the reward of past work, but the preparation for 
future. You are laying up the strength, spirit, and 
patience, needful for the winter months, if you are 
to see that tim.e. And you must act on the calcu- 
lation that you are to see it. On dark Sunday 
afternoons in Januar}', when gas is lit throughout 
the church, and snow lies in the wintry streets, you 
may preach your sermon with the greater heart and 
vigour for the hours you sit now on a stone by the 
seaside, lookingf- at the waves ; and for the bracin^- 
breezes that supply the ozone the city lacks. So 
the diligent clergyman is as much in the Avay of 
duty while enjoying his autumn rest, as while ful- 
filling the work of the remainder of the year. 

That you may thoroughly enjoy the autumn holi- 
days, it is essential that you should feel that they 



12 By the Seaside. 



have been fairly earned by long and hard work. 
You cannot feel the delight of rest, unless by con- 
trast .with toil, hurry, and weariness. All this quiet 
and beauty, to you and me grateful as water to the 
thirsty, would be to people who habitually live an 
idle life, no better than something insufferably dull 
and stupid. Let us hope that we have faithfully 
gone through the previous discipline, that will make - 
us relish simple quiet and peace. Some people 
think it shows humility to say things against them- 
selves which they know are not true. They meekly 
confess sins of which they are aware they are not 
guilty: saying what they suppose must be true, 
instead of what they feel to be true. Let us never 
do the like. Few things are more fatal to a true and 
honest spirit. For myself, I will say without reserve, 
that in these last ten months I have worked to the 
very best of my ability and strength, to fulfil my 
duty. And if not very much after all, I have done 
what I could. I can say the like for certain dear 
friends in my own profession. They never wilfully 
neglect any work. They never see anything that 
ought to be done, without trying to do it. Unpro- 
fitable servants, doubtless, in the sight of One above 
us : but at least we can look our fellow-men in the 
face. 

I suppose, my readers, we have all a picture in 
our minds of the ideal autumn holidays. They never 
have come : they are never to be. Yet we can think 



By the Seaside, 13 

of broad harvest fields, golden in sunshine ; of mag- 
nificent trees, the growth of centuries; of green 
glades with the startled deer ; of the gray Gothic 
dwelling, large and hospitable ; of a mode of life in 
which sickness, anxiety, vague fears, and pinching 
efforts to save shillings, are quite unknown. Yes, 
it is to be admitted that this ugly little cottage, 
and its surroundings physical and moral, are no 
more than a makeshift. But then, my friend, what 
more is all our life, and all our lot 1 We must make 
them do : we have great reason to be thankful for 
things as they are : but all this is not what we used 
to think of, when we were little children or hope- 
ful youths. Let us train ourselves to look at lights 
rather than darks. There is such a thing as an eye 
for lights, and such a thing as an eye for darks. 
You know, when you look at a grand Gothic win- 
dow, the eastern window of a noble church ; and 
when you look at a much smaller Gothic window ; 
you may look either at the dark tracery of stone, or 
at the lights of gorgeous storied glass. Now, in a 
physical sense, it is well to look at each in turn. 
You may behold a really excellent window by this : 
that the darks are beautiful in form if you fix your 
attention on them only : and the lights are likewise 
beautiful in form if you consider them by them- 
selves. An inferior architect will give you the 
tracery beautiful but the lights shapeless; or the lights 
pretty but the tracery ugly. But though it is well, 



14 By the Seaside 



physically, to have an eye for both darks and lights, 
it is best, usually, to look mainly at lights, as you 
contemplate the grand Gothic window of your lot, 
and of circumstances. For many people look at 
the darks, to the exclusion of the lights. They 
dwell on the worries of their condition, to the for- 
getfulness of its blessings and advantages. They 
contemplate the smoky chimney of their dining- 
room, to the forgetfulness of a hundred good things. 
They try to get other people to do the like. My 
friend Smith told me that once on a time he had 
Mr. Jones to preach in his church. Smith's church 
holds fifteen hundred people, and it is perfectly filled 
by its congregation : of this circumstance Smith is 
pardonably proud. When Mr. Jones preached, the 
church was quite crowded, save that three seats 
(not pews, seats for a single person each) were 
vacant in a front gallery. But so keen was Mr. 
Jones's eye for darks, to the oblivion of lights, that 
after service he merely said to Smith that he had 
remarked three seats empty in the gallery. Not 
one thought or word had he for the fourteen hundred 
and ninety-seven seats that were filled. Smith was 
a little mortified. But by-and-bye he remembered 
that the peculiar disposition of Mr. Jones was one 
that would inflict condign punishment upon itself. 
Then he was sorry rather than angry. Yes, my 
friend : let us be glad if we have an eye for the lights 
of life, rather than for its darks ! 



By the Seaside. 15 

It is curious how very soon the burden drops 
from one's back, when you come for your hoHdays 
to some place far away from your home and your 
duty. The rehef is in direct proportion to the dis- 
tance in miles. A hundred miles wull suffice : a 
thousand are better. Very lightly does the care of 
your parish rest on you, when the parish is a thou- 
sand miles distant ! Even a tenth part of that 
amount makes one feel as a horse must, when its 
harness is removed and its shoes taken off and it 
is turned out to grass. As you put on a tweed suit, 
and adopt a wideawake hat, you forget the respon- 
sibilities and labours of past months : you cease to 
be the same man. The careful lines are smoothed 
out of your face ; the hair pauses in growing gray. 
It is necessary, indeed, to the true sense of rest, 
that you should have the feeling of a good long 
horizon of time before you. A few days in the 
country, with the feeling that you are just going 
back to work, will not do : the feverish pulse 
vvill keep by you. It is quite a different thing, 
when you know you have several weeks in prospect. 
Then you expatiate : then you truly rest. Those 
good men who remain within a few miles of their 
parish, and who go back for each Sunday's duty, 
do not enjoy the feeling of the holiday-time at all. 
And feeling is the reality. It is not what a thing 
is in itself, but how it presents itself to you. You 
know how different a thing a railway station thirty 



1 6 By the Seaside. 

miles from home looks to you when you are to stop 
at it, and when you are to go on three hundred 
miles further. 

It is pleasant, and at first a little perplexing, 
instead of setting to work after breakfast, to go 
forth and wander about the shore, or sit on a rock 
as long as you please, with the sense that you are 
neglecting nothing that needs to be done. You 
feel, as regards time, as a poor man who has sud- 
denly inherited a large fortune must feel towards 
money. Strange, to have so much to spare of the 
thing of which before one had so little ! And how 
misty and unreal the scenes and the life that are 
distant and past grow to be! I cannot at this 
minute, sitting on a warm stone by the sea in the 
morning sunshine, feel that at the entrance to a 
certain square, stands in this same sunshine, with a 
little shrubbery before it, a certain church, Ionic as 
to its front elevation, which the writer well knows. 
It is always there when I go back : but I do not 
know what becomes of it in the meanwhile. 

There is nothing more certain than this, that it 
will not answer to go to your resting-place to spend 
your holiday-time, without having thought of what 
you are to do while there. If the truth were told, 
it would be the confession of many men that the 
enjoyment of their holidays was all in the anticipa- 
tion and the retrospect ; and that the holidays 
themselves were a very disappointing and tiresome 



By the Seaside. 1 7 

time, — very listless and weary. All this comes of 
their vaguely believing that to enjoy the season of 
rest, all you have to do is to go to some quiet 
retired place, and then some occupation will suggest 
itself, some mode of getting the due enjoyment out 
of the long-expected time. A clergyman might 
just as wisely ascend his pulpit without having 
thought of what he is to say from it, of his text and 
his sermon ; and count upon these turning up at the 
moment they are needed. Before going to the sea- 
side, you should carefully consider what you are to 
do there, and map out some little plan of life : not 
adhering to it, of course, should some pleasant de- 
viation suggest itself. And everyone must devise 
such a plan for himself, according to his own liking. 
Only let it be remembered, that it will not do to be 
absolutely vacant. Time will hang heavy ; and 
then enjoyment is at an end. Different men have 
devised different modes of light occupation for their 
holiday-time : and that which suited one man 
might be most unsuitable for another. Mr. Jay, 
the eminent Nonconformist of Bath, tells us that it 
helped him to thoroughly enjoy his vacation, to 
write one little sermon in the morning of each day, 
and another in the evening. The sermons were 
certainly very brief: you might read each in five 
minutes : yet not every preacher would have re- 
garded it as recreation to produce them. There are 
very many to whom sermon-writing does not come 

C 



By the Seaside. 



so easily : to whom a sermon is the thought of a 
week, not the diversion of an hour. Let It be said 
that Mr. Jay's Httle sermons now fill four volumes, 
under the title of Morning and Evening Exercises : 
they provide a little pious reading for the morning? 
and evenings of a year. The writer is so very warm 
a Churchman, that he seldom looks at the volumes 
without regretting that the good man was not one : 
the more so, as it is plain that no conscientious 
scruple kept him out of his national Church. Yet 
let it be said, that if you read the little discourses 
daily for a year, you will leave off with a very 
kindly and pleasant impression of their author. It 
is not that any one discourse is in any way specially 
brilliant; but that all are so evenly good. And 
they treat, in the most admirable spirit, not the 
matters on which good Christians differ ; but those 
on which they all agree. 

For men to whom the writing of sermons is not 
relaxation but rather work, yet whose likings are 
quiet and scholarly, certain rules may be suggested. 
In addition to the physical employment of moun- 
tain excursions, yachting, riding, shooting and the 
like, let abundance of reading be provided. Let 
the Times daily tell how the great world goes : let 
plenty of other newspapers come besides. Thus 
post-time will be a fresh sensation, even if very few 
letters appear, and these of very small interest. 
And besides as many pleasant new books as you 



By the Seaside. 19 

can get, let there be some large work, of many 
volumes, read perhaps long ago, yet worth reading 
again ; and which could not be read satisfactorily 
amid the pressure of working days and months. 
And weeks before you come to the seaside, consider 
what this book shall be. Mine, this year, is Lock- 
hart's Life of Sir Walter Scott: an admirable his- 
tory of a great and good man. If you have read it 
as a boy, read it once more as a man : and you will 
find how well you remember it. It is a sad history, 
certainly: and you will find many things to be 
thought of with deep regret : yet you will rise from 
it with a hearty admiration and affection for the 
greatest Scotchman. And often, as you go on, you 
will come on passages that will make you pause and 
muse, with the finger in the half-closed book. 

But the writer's special occupation during these 
holidays, is to revise and consider the essays which 
make up this volume. He has very little time, 
now, for writing such ; and the little time is growing 
less. The spare hours of two years have gone to 
the production of this little book : it will always be 
pleasant to look back on time so pleasantly spent. 
And these chapters have already met so kind a 
reception, as they appeared in that dear old maga- 
zine in which the writer saw his earliest article in 
print and his latest, and in another magazine which 
professes to publish good words, though some 
people have declared it to be a bad and dangerous 



20 By the Seaside. 



periodical ; that the indulgent reader may easily 
understand how this volume has been added to the 
list of certain which have gone before. Let me wish 
for this book that it may fall into as kind hands as 
the rest ; and into as many. 

It is a great thing to have some occupation, in a 
time and place like this, which implies no exertion. 
It is pleasant, for a very small author, to sit down 
on a rustic seat under a shady tree, or on a rock by 
the sea with the murmuring water lapping at one's 
feet ; and there peacefully to read over one's essay. 
A distinguished American author has put on record 
the feelings with which he read his own first book : 
he says frankly, ' I never read a more interesting 
volume ! ' Under the shadow of that illustrious 
precedent it may be confessed, that though when 
busy with serious work you have something else to 
do than to read your own compositions, yet in a 
season of leisure it is light and pleasant employment 
for an author to do so. Somebody once on a time 
sent me a lengthened and friendly criticism of these 
essays, in which it was yet mentioned, as a ground of 
complaint, that no mental exertion was needful to 
follow them. That is precisely what their author 
wished : and he will be too glad to think that it is 
so. He has pioneered the road, through the jungle 
and up the pass : he trusts it is smooth and easy. 
Yet let it be said, that what is easy to read, is for 
the most part difficult to write. 



By the Seaside. 21 

Let me be allowed a closing word. Why does 
the writer call himself a coimtry parson ? Years 
have passed since he left that beautiful green 
valley with the river, the trees and the hills ; and 
went to a great city. But country parson is the 
name that suits him : and the name by which many 
kind friends know him. So he calls himself by it, 
just as his friend Smith calls himself Smith. It is 
not that that individual is a smith in fact : but that 
Smith is the name by which people have agreed to 
call and know him. The ancestor who first bore 
the name was in fact a smith : and the name of 
Smith continued to be handed down after the fact 
of smith ceased. So let it be with the author's 
cherished designation. 

And there is more. Though he now does the 
duty of a parish in a great city, it is the city in 
which, above all others, country and town are 
mingled in the most charming way. In the parish 
which he serves, you may even find beautiful shady 
walks, and expanses of grass and flowers, where 
you might think yourself far from town smoke and 
bustle. And indeed you are : for in that most 
beautiful of cities, there is no smoke and little 
bustle. May it be always so ! 



CHAPTER 11. 
CONCERNING UNPRUNED TREES. 




N this writing-table, here in a great city, 
there He two large pruning-knives, unused 
for five years. They look inconsistent 
enough with the usual belongings of the work-room 
of the incumbent of a town parish ; who on weekdays 
walks about chiefly upon paving-stones, and on Sun- 
days preaches to city folk. But Britons know that 
there are institutions which the wise man would pre- 
serve, though their day and their use have passed 
away. So is it with these knives : buck-horn as to 
their handles, and black with rust as to their blades. 
The writer will never cast them away : will never 
lock them up in a drawer rarely visited, degrading 
them from the prominent and easily-reached spot 
where they lay in years that are gone. Never 
again, in all likelihood, will those knives be used 
by the hand that was wont to use them : yet they 
serve their owner well when they bring back the 



Concerning Unpruncd Trees. 



pleasant picture of days when he was a country 
parson and pruned many shrubs and trees : walking 
about leisurely in the enjoyment of snipping off, as 
a schoolmaster of my youth was accustomed to 
walk dovv"n the rows of boys busy in writing, here 
and there coming down with a heavy lash on some 
unlucky back, merely for his own recreation and 
with no moral aim. Yes, there is a tranquil delight in 
pruning : to a simple and unfevered mind it is a 
very fascinating pursuit. And it is a good sign of 
a man if he finds pleasure in it. Alas, w^e outgrow 
the days in which it makes us happy to prune 
trees ! 

The reader who is given to pruning, knows how 
very much some trees need it. You know how 
horribly awkward and ugly an old bay becomes, 
after it has been untended for years. It has great 
branches, which stick out most ungracefully. And 
it is likely enough that the whole tree is so inex- 
tricably grown into that ungainly form, that it is 
best to saw it off about three or four feet from the 
ground, and to let it begin to grow anew. Thus 
starting afresh, you may be able to miake it a 
pretty and graceful object, though of much di- 
minished size. There are trees whose nature is 
such, that they can do with little or no pruning. 
They don't need to be watched : they cost no 
trouble. Such is a Portugal laurel : such is a 
weeping birch : such is a beech : such is an oak. 



24 Concerning Unpritned Trees. 

But not such is an Irish yew : not such is an apple- 
tree, nor any kind of fruit-tree. And in the days 
when you were the possessor of trees, and were 
sometimes a good deal worried by the charge of 
them, I know you often thought what a blessing it 
is that there are some that need no pruning : some 
that once put in their place, you may let alone. 
For there were some that needed ceaseless tending : 
they grew horrible unless you were always watching 
them, and cutting off this and that little shoot that 
was growing in a wrong direction. It was an awful 
thing, standing beside some tree that had given 
you a great amount of trouble, to think what it 
would come to if it were just left to itself 

Most human beings are very like the latter order 
of trees. They need a great deal of pruning. 
Little odd habits, the rudiments of worse habits, 
need every now and then to be cut off and cor- 
rected. We should all grow very singular, ridicu- 
lous, and unamiable creatures, but for the pruning 
we have got from hands kind and unkind, from our 
earliest days : but for the pruning we are getting 
from such hands yet. Perhaps you have known a 
man who had lived for forty years alone. And 
you know what odd shoots he had sent out : what 
strange traits and habits he had acquired : what 
singular little ways he had got into. There had 
been no one at home to prune him : and the little 
shoots of eccentricity, of vanity, of vain self-estima- 



Concer7iing Unpruned Trees. 25 

tion, that might have easily been cut off when they 
were green and soft, have now grown into rigidity : 
woody fibre has been developed : and if you were 
to try to cut off the oddity now, it would be like 
trying to lop off a tough oak branch a foot thick 
with a penknife. You cannot do it : if you were 
to succeed in doing it, you would thereby change 
the whole man. Equally grown into rigid awk- 
wardness with the man who has lived a very 
solitary life, the man is likely to be who for many 
years has been the Pope of a little circle of ad- 
miring disciples, no one of whom would ever con- 
tradict him, no one of whom would ever venture to 
say he judged or did wrong. In such a case, not 
merely are the angularities, the odd ungainly shoots, 
not cut off: they are actually fostered. And a really 
good man grows into a bundle of awkwardnesses 
and oddities, and stiffens hopelessly into these. 
And these greatly lessen his influence and useful- 
ness with people who do not know his real excel- 
lences. You cannot read the life of Mr. Simeon, 
of Cambridge, without lamenting that there was 
not some kind yet firm hand always near him, to 
prune off the wretched little shoots of self-conceit 
and silliness which obscured in great measure the 
sterling qualities of the man. You may remember 
reading how on an occasion on which some good 
ladies had collected pieces of needle-work to be sold 
for a missionary purpose, he came to behold them. 



26 Concerning Unpruned Trees. 

He skipped into the room : held up his hands in a 
theatrical ecstasy of admiration : and went through 
various ungainly gambols and uttered various 
wretched jokes, by way of compliment to the good 
ladies. I don't tell you the story at length : it is 
too humiliating. Now do you think the good man 
would ever have done this, had he lived among 
people who durst question his infallibility and im- 
peccability } What a blessing it would have been 
for him had there been some one on such terms 
with him that he could say, * Now, Simeon, dear 
fellow, don't make a fool of yourself ! ' 

It is at once apparent, that when some really 
kind and judicious friend, or even some judicious 
person who is not a kind friend, says to you as you 
are saying something, ' Smith, you're talking non- 
sense : shut up, and don't make a fool of yourself; ' 
this fact is highly analogous to the fact of a keen 
pruning-knife snipping off a shoot that is growing 
in a wrong direction. And you may have seen a 
good man, accustomed to dwell among those who 
never dared to differ from him, look as if the world 
were suddenly coming to an end, when some cour- 
ageous person said to his face what many persons 
had frequently said behind his back : to wit, that he 
was talking nonsense. You may find a house here 
and there, in which the grey mare is the more ener- 
getic if not the better horse: where the husband 
has been constrained by years of outrageous ill- 



Concerning U^ipruned Trees. 27 

temper to give the wife her own way : and where, 
accordingly, the mistress of the house has lived for 
thirty years without once being told she did wrong. 
The tree, that is, had never been pruned in all that 
time : and you may imagine what an ugly and dis- 
agreeable tree it had grown. For people who get 
their own way, have nothing to repress their evil 
and ridiculous tendencies except their own sense of 
propriety: and I have little faith in the practical 
guidance of that sense, unless it be reinforced and 
directed by the moral and aesthetic sense of other 
people. A tree, when pruned, suffers in silence : no 
doubt, it cannot like being pruned : it would like to 
have its own way. But the pruning of a human 
being, accustomed to his or her own way, is often 
accompanied by much moral kicking and howling. 
Such a person, in those years without pruning, has 
very likely got confirmed in many ridiculous and 
disagreeable habits : has learned to sit with his feet 
upon the mantel-piece : has come to use ungram- 
matical and ugly forms of speech : has grown into 
rubbing his nose, or twirling his thumbs, or making 
pills of paper while conversing with others : indeed 
there is no reckoning the ugly growths into which 
unpruned human nature will develop itself; and 
self-conceited and haughty and petted folk deliber- 
ately deprive themselves of that salutary tending 
and pruning which is needful to keep them in de- 
cent shape. ' There was once a man, who was much 



28 Concerning Unpruned Trees. 

given to advocating the admission of fresh air : an 
excellent end. But of course in advocating it, the 
word Ventilation had frequently to be used ; and 
that man made himself ridiculous in the eyes of all 
educated people by invariably pronouncing the 
word as Ventulation. For a long time, a youthful 
relative of that man suffered in silence the terrible 
annoyance of listening to the word, thus rendered : 
and there are few more irritating things among the 
minor vexations of life, than to be compelled ha- 
bitually to listen to some vulgar and illiterate error 
in speech. Perhaps you have felt a burning desire 
to prune a person, who talked of some trouble being 
tremenduous] or who said he would rather go to 
Jericho as hear Dr. Log preach ; or who declared 
the day to be that hot that he was nearly killed. 
Oh, the thought of such expressions makes one's 
nerves tingle, and one's hand steal towards the 
pruning-knife. But after long endurance, the youth- 
ful relative of the man who talked about Ventida- 
iio7t, could stand it no longer : and ventured humbly 
to suggest that Ventilation was the preferable way 
of setting forth the word. Ah, the tree did not 
take the pruning peaceably ! Wasn't there an ex- 
plosion of vanity and spite and stupidity ! Was 
not the youthful individual scorched with furious 
sarcasm, for pretending to know better than his 
seniors, and for venturing to think that his betters 
could go wrong ! From that day forward, he re- 



Concerning Unpruned Trees. 29 

solved that however hideous the shoots of ignorance 
and conceit his seniors put forth, lie would not ven- 
ture to correct them. For there is nothing that so 
Infuriates an uneducated and self-sufficient man of 
more than middle age, as the faintest and best- 
disguised attempt to prune him. * Are you sure 
that your data Is correct ? ' said a vulgar rich man 
to an educated poor man. '■ Data ARE correct, I 
think you mean,' said the poor man (rather hastily), 
before going on to answer the question. The rich 
man's face reddened like an infuriated turkeycock; 
and had there been a cudgel In his hand, he would 
have beaten the pruner upon the head. Yes : It Is 
thankless work to wield the moral prunlng-knife. 

Probably among the class of old bachelors you 
may find the most signal Instances of the evil con- 
sequence of going through life with nobody to prune 
one. I could easily record such manifestations of 
silliness and absurdity in the case of such men as 
would be incredible. Of course, I am not going to 
do so. An old bachelor of some standing, living 
in a solitary house, with servants who dare not prune 
him, and with acquaintances who will not take the 
trouble to prune him, must necessarily, unless he 
be a very wise and good man, grow into a most 
amorphous shape. I beg the reader to mark the 
exception I make : for I presume he will agree 
with me when I say, that in the class of old bache- 
lors and old maids, may be found some of the 



Concerning Unpru7ied Trees. 



noblest specimens of the human race. A judicious 
wife is ahvays snipping off from her husband's 
moral nature, little twigs that are growing in wrong 
directions. She keeps him in shape, by continual 
pruning. If you say anything silly, she will affec- 
tionately tell you so. If you declare that you will 
^ do some absurd thing, she will find means of pre- 
^-^<^ venting your doing it. / And by far the chief part of 
/all the common sense there is in this world, belongs 
Y / unquestionably to women. The wisest things a 
t»^ man commonly does, are those which his wife 
^^ a, counsels him to do. It is not always so. You may 
t ^ have known a man do, at the instigation of his wife, 
■^ v3 / things so malicious, petty, and stupid, that it is 
%^ \ inconceivable any man should ever do them at all. 
^^ j 3ut such cases are exceptional. 

My friend Jones, when a boy of fourteen, went to 
visit a relative, a rich old bachelor. That relative 
was substantially a very kind person : that is, he 
gave Jones lots of money, and the like. But Jones, 
an observant lad, speedily took his relative's mea- 
sure. The first evening Jones was with him, the 
old bachelor said, In a very cordial way, ' Now Tom, 
my boy, it is my duty to tell you something. You 
have been trained up to believe that your father ' 
(a clergyman) ' is an able and dignified person. It 
is right that you should know that he is a very 
poor stick.' 

Jones listened, without remark, but with rather a 



Concerning Unprnned Trees. 



scared face. It was a trial to the young fellow. It 
was a shock to his belief in things in general, to 
hear his father thus spoken of. And Jones, who is 
now a man, tells me that though he said nothing, 
he inwardly groaned, looking at his wealthy rela- 
tive, ' You're a horrid old fool.' And in all the 
years that have passed since then, Jones assures me 
he has not in the least modified that early opinion. 

Now, don't you feel that no married man would 
have so behaved } Even if he were such an ass as 
to begin to say such a thing to a little boy, don't 
you feel his wife (if present) would have taken care 
that the sentence was never finished } 

The same person began to tell Jones about the 
Opera. And all of a sudden, to the lad's conster- 
nation, he burst out into some awful roars. Jones 
was terrified. He thought his relative had gone mad, 
or was suddenly seized by some unusual and ter- 
rible disease. But the old gentleman said, with 
great self-complacency, 'That's just to give you 
some idea what the human voice is capable of!' 
Jones secretly thought that it gave him some idea 
what a fool an old gentleman might make of himself. 

I have heard of an extremely commonplace man, 
who lived an utterly solitary life in London. He 
had gained considerable wealth : but he had nothing 
else to stand on ; and he was not rich enough to 
stand on that alone. The worthy man has been 
in his grave for many years. Having heard that 



32 Co7icer7iing Unpruned Trees. 

Mr. Brown had stated that he did not know him, he 
exclaimed : ' He does not know ME ! Well, there 
is no Act of Parliament to make people know about 
me. All I can say is, that if he does not know 
about me, he is an ill-informed man ! ' This was 
not a joke. It was said in bitter earnest. For when 
a young fellow who was present showed a tendency 
to smile at this outburst of self-conceit nursed in 
solitude, the young fellow was furiously ordered out 
of the room. 

Doubtless you have remarked, with satisfaction, 
how the little oddities of men who marry rather 
late in life, are pruned away speedily after their 
marriage. You have found a man who used to be 
shabbily and carelessly dressed, with a huge shirt- 
collar frayed at the edges, and a glaring yellow silk 
pocket handkerchief, broken of these things, and 
become a pattern of neatness. You have seen a 
man whose hair and whiskers were ridiculously cut, 
speedily become like other human beings. You 
have seen a clergyman who wore a long beard, in a 
little while appear without one. You have seen a 
man who used to sing ridiculous sentimental songs, 
leave them off. You have seen a man who took 
snuff copiously, and who generally had his breast 
covered with snuff, abandon the vile habit. 1 A wife 
is the grand wielder of the moral prunlng-knife.; If 
Johnson's wife had lived, there would have been no 
hoarding up of bits of orange peel : no touching 



Concerning Unprtmed Trees. 33 

all the posts in walking along the street : no eating 
and drinking with a disgusting voracity. If Oliver 
Goldsmith had been married, he would never have 
worn that memorable and ridiculous coat. When- 
ever you find a man whom you know little about, 
oddly dressed, or talking absurdly, or exhibiting 
any eccentricity of manner, you may be tolerably 
sure that he is not a married man. For the little 
corners are rounded off, the little shoots are pruned 
away, in married men. Wives generally have much 
more sense than their husbands, especially when the 
husbands are clever men. /^The wife's advices are 
like the ballast, that keeps the ship steady. They 
are like the wholesome though painful shears, snip- 
ping off little growths of self-conceit and folly./ 

So you may see, that it is not good for man to be 
alone. For he will put out various shoots at his own 
sour will, which will grow into monstrously ugly 
and absurd branches unless they are pruned away 
while they are young. But it is quite as bad, per- 
haps it is worse, to live among people with whom 
you are an Oracle. There are many good Protes- 
tants who, by a long continuance of such a life, have 
come to believe their own infallibility much more 
strongly than the Pope believes his. An only 
brother amid a large family of sisters, is in a 
perilous position. There is a risk of his coming 
to think himself the greatest, wisest, and best of 
men : the most graceful dancer, the most melodious 

D 



34 Concerning Unpritned Trees. 

singer, the sweetest poet, the most unerring shot : 
also the best-dressed man, and the possessor of the 
most beautiful hands, feet, eyes, and whiskers. And 
as the outer world is sure not to accept this esti- 
mate, the only brother is apt to be soured by the 
sharp contrast between the adulation at home and 
the snubbing abroad. A popular clergyman, with 
a congregation somewhat lacking in intelligence, is 
exposed to a prejudicial moral atmosphere. It is 
a dreadful sight, to see some clergymen surrounded 
by the members of their flock- You see them, with 
dilated nostrils, inhaling the ine^nse, directly and 
indirectly offered. It irritates onfe» to hear such a 
person spoken of (as I have heard in my youth) as 
^ the dear man,' ' the precious man,' or even, in some 
cases, ' the sweet man.' It is a great deal too much 
for average human nature to live- among people 
who agree with all oij^e says, and think it very fine. 
We all need 'the animated No:' a forest tree will 
not grow up healthy and strong unless you let the 
rude blasts wrestle with it and root it firmer. It is 
insufferable, when any mortal lives in a moral hot- 
house. And if there be anything for which a 
clergyman ought to be thankful, it is if his congre- 
gation, though duly esteeming him for his office 
and for his work, have so much good sense as to 
refrain from spoiling him, by deferring unduly to 
all his crotchets. Let there be as few worsted slip- 
pers as possible sent him : no bouquets laid on his 



Concerning Unpruned T^^ecs. 35 

study table by youthful hands before he comes 
down stairs in the morning : no young women pre- 
serving under a glass shade the glove they wore in 
shaking hands with him, that it may be profaned 
by no inferior touch. Let the phrase dear man. be 
utterly excluded. A manly person does not want 
to be made a pet of. And if there be any occasion 
on which a man of sense, bishop or not, ought to 
be filled with shame and confusion, it is when man 
or woman kneels down and asks his blessing. Pray, 
how much is the blessing worth ? WTiat good will it 
do anybody .? Most educated men have a very de- 
cided estimate of its value, w^hich would be expressed 
in figures by a round o. 

One great good of a great public school, is the 
way in which the moral pruning-knife is wielded 
there. I do not mean by the masters, but by the 
republic of boys. Many a lad of rank and fortune, 
in whom the evil shoots of arrogance, self-conceit, 
contempt for his fellow-creatures, and a notion that 
he himself is the mightiest of mortals, have been 
fostered at home by the adulation of sen^ants and 
cottagers and tenantry, has these evil shoots 
effectually shred away. You have heard, of course, 
how the Duke of i\Iiddlesex and Southwark came 
to his title as a baby : and grew up under the care 
of obsequious tutors and governors till he had 
attained the age to go to school. The first evening 
he was there, he was standing at a corner of the 



36 Concerning Unpruned Trees. 

playground with a supercilious air, surveying the 
sports that were proceeding. A boy about his own 
size perceived him : and running up, said, with some 
curiosity, ' Who are you ? ' ^ The Duke of Middle- 
sex and Southwark,' was the reply. ' Oh,' said the 
other boy, with awakened interest, ^ There's one 
kick for the Duke of Middlesex and another for the 
Duke of Southwark ; ' and having thus delivered 
himself, he ran away. O what a sharp pair of shears 
in that moment pruned off certain shoots which had 
been growing in that little peer's nature ever since 
the dawn of intelligence ! The awful yet salutary 
truth was impressed, by a single lesson, that there 
were places in this world where nobody cared for 
the Duke of Middlesex and Southwark. And per- 
haps that painful pruning was the beginning of the 
discipline which made that duke, as long as he 
lived, the most unpretending, admirable, and truly 
noble of men. 

There are few people in public life who in this 
age are not promptly pruned, where needful, by 
ever-ready shears. If the shoots of bumptiousness 
appear in a Chief Justice, they are instantly cut short 
by the tongue of some resolute barrister. If a 
Prime Minister, or even a loftier personage, evinces 
a disposition to neglect his or her duty, that dispo- 
sition is speedily pruned by the Times ; speaking in 
the name of the general sense of what is fit. And 
indeed the newspapers and reviews are the universal 



Concerning Unpruned Trees. 37 

shears. If any outgrowth of folly, error, or conceit, 
appear in a political man, or in a writer of even 
moderate standing, some clever article comes down 
upon it, and shows it up if it cannot snip it off. 
And if a wase man desires that he may keep, in- 
tellectually and aesthetically, in becoming shape, he 
will attentively consider w^hatever may be said or 
written about him by people Avho dislike him. For, 
as a general rule, people who don't like you come 
down sharply upon your real faults : they tell you 
things which it is very fit that you should know ; 
and which nobody is likely to tell you but them. I 
have heard of one or two distinguished authors who 
made it a rule never to read anything that was 
written about themselves. Probably they erred in 
this. They missed many hints for which they 
might have been the better. And mannerisms and 
eccentricities developed into rigid boughs, which 
might have been readily removed as growing twigs. 
A vain self-confidence is very likely to grow up 
in a man who is never subjected to the moral 
pruning-knife. The greatest men (in their own 
judgment) that you have ever known, have probably 
been the magnates of some little village, far from 
neighbours. Probably the bully is never developed 
more offensively than in some village dealer, who 
has accumulated a good deal of money, and who 
has got a number of the surrounding cottages 
mortgaged to him. Such is the man who is likely 



3 



8 Concernmg Unpruned Trees. 



to insult the Conservative candidate, when he 
comes to make a speech before an election. Such 
is the man to lead the opposition to any good work 
proposed by the parish clergyman. Such is the 
man to become a church-rate martyr, or an especially 
offensive manager of Salem Chapel. Such is the 
kind of man who, if he has children growing up, will 
refuse to let them express their opinion on any sub- 
ject. A parent can fall into no greater mistake 
than to take the ground that he will never argue 
with his children, nor hear what they may have to 
suggest in opposition to any plan he may have pro- 
posed. For children very speedily take the measure 
of their parents ; and have a perfectly clear idea 
how far their ability, judgment, and education, 
justify their assuming the rank of infallible oracles. 
And it is infinitely better to let a lad of eighteen 
speak out his mind, than to have him like a boiler 
ready to burst with repressed views and feelings, 
and with the bitter sense of a petty and contempti- 
ble tyranny. Something has already been said of 
women who acquire the chief power in their own 
houses : whose husbands are cowed into cyphers : 
and whose infallibihty is to be recognized through- 
out the establishment, under pain of some ferocious 
explosion. At last, some son grows up ; and 
resists the established despotism. Infallibility and 
impeccability are conceded no longer. And the 
thick branches, consolidated by many years' growth, 



Concerning Unpruned Trees. 39 

are lopped off painfully, which should have gone 
when they were slender shoots. Rely upon it, the 
man or woman who refuses to be peaceably and 
kindly pruned, will some day have to bear being 
rudely lopped. 

There is one shoot which human nature keeps 
putting forth again, however frequently it is pruned 
away. It is self-conceit. That would grow into a 
terrible unwieldy branch, if it were not so often 
shred away by circumstances : that is, by God's 
Providence. Everybody needs to be frequently 
taken down : which means, to have his self-conceit 
pruned away. And what everybody needs, most 
people (in this case) get. Most people are very 
frequently taken down. 

I mean, even modest and sensible people. This 
wretched little shoot keeps growing again, however 
hard w^e try to keep it down. There is a tendency 
in each of us to be growing up into a higher opinion 
of ourself: and then, all of a sudden, that higher 
estimate is cut down to the very earth. You are 
like a sheep suddenly shorn : a thick fleece of self- 
complacency had developed itself: something comes 
and all at once shears it off, and leaves you shivei- 
ing in the frosty air. You are like a lawn, where 
the grass had grown some inches in length ; till 
some dewy morning it is mown just as close as may 
be. You had gradually and insensibly come to 
think rather well ' of yourself, and your doings. 



40 Concerning Unpruned Trees. 

You had grown to think your position in life a 
rather respectable or even eminent one; and to 
fancy that those around estimated you rather 
highly. But all of a sudden, some slight, some 
mortification, some disappointment comes : some- 
thing is said or done that shows you how far you 
had been deceiving yourself Some considerable 
place in your profession becomes vacant, and 
nobody thinks of naming you for it. You are in 
company with two or three men who think them- 
selves specially charged with finding a suitable 
person for the vacant office : they name a score of 
possible people to fill it : but not you. They never 
have thought of you : or possibly they refrain from 
naming you, with the design of mortifying you. 
And so you are pruned close. For the moment, it 
is painful. You are ready to sink down, disheartened 
and beaten. You have no energy to do anything. 
You sit down blankly by the fire, and acknowledge 
yourself a failure in life. It is not so much that you 
are beaten, as that you are set in a lower place than 
you hoped. Yet it is all good for us, doubtless. 
Few men can say they are too humble with it all. 
And, as even after all our mowings, prunings, and 
shearings we are sometimes so conceited and self- 
satisfied as we are, what should we have been had 
those things not befallen us } The elf-locks of w^ool 
would have been feet in length. The grass would 
have been six feet high, like that of the prairies. 



Concerning Unprimed Trees. 41 

And the shoot of vanity would have grown and 
consolidated into a branch, that would have given a 
lopsided aspect to the whole tree. 

Happily, there is no chance of these things occur- 
ring. We seldom grow for more than a few days, 
without being pruned, mown, and shorn afresh. And 
all this will continue to the end. It is not pleasant ; 
but we need it all. And we are all profiting by it. 
Possibly no one will read this page, who does not 
know that he thinks more humbly of himself now 
than he did ten years since. And ten years hence, 
if we live, we shall think of ourselves more humbly 
still. 

Yes : we have all been severely pruned, in many 
ways. Perhaps our sprays and blossoms have been 
shred away by a knife so unsparing, that we are cut 
very much into the form of a pollarded tree. Per- 
haps we have been pruned too much ; and the 
spring and the nonsense taken out of us only too 
effectually. Certain awkward knots are left in the 
wood, where some cherished hope was snipped off 
by the fatal shears, or some youthful affection (in 
the case of sentimental people) came to nothing; 
and it was like cutting a tree over, not far above 
the roots, when a man was made to feel that his en- 
tire aim in Hfe was no better than a dismal failure. 
But it was all for the best; and /defeat, bravely 
borne, is the noblest of victories!) What an over- 



42 Concerning Unpruned Trees. 

bearing, insolent person you would have been, if you 
had always got your own way ; if your boyish fan- 
cies had come true ! What an odd stick you would 
have become, had you been one of the Unpruned 
Trees ! 




CHAPTER III. 
CONCERNING UGLY DUCKS: 

BEING SOME THOUGHTS ON MISPLACED 

MEN. 




OME men's geese, it has occasionally been 
said, are all swans. Dr. Newman declares 
that this was so with the great Archbishop 
Whately of Dublin. Read this page, intelligent per- 
son; and you shall be informed about an Ugly Duck, 
and what it proved in truth to be. 

•Rather, you shall be reminded of what you doubt- 
less know already. The story is not mine : it was 
originally devised by somebody much wiser and 
possibly somewhat better. I propose to do no more 
than tell afresh, and briefly, what has been told at 
much greater length before. No doubt it has 
touched and comforted many to read it. For there 
may be much wisdom and great consolation in a 
Fairy Tale. 

Amid a family of little ducks, there was one, very 
big, ugly, and awkward. He looked so odd and un- 



44 Concerning Ugly Ducks : 

couth, that those who beheld him generally felt that 
he wanted a thrashing. And in truth, he frequently 
got one. He was bitten, pushed about, and laughed 
at, by all the ducks, and even by the hens, of the 
house to which he belonged. Thus the poor crea- 
ture was quite cast down under the depressing sense 
of his ugliness. And the members of his own family 
used him worst of all. He ran away from home : 
and lived for a while in a cottage with a cat and an 
old woman. Here, likewise, he failed to be appre- 
ciated. For chancing to tell them how he liked to 
dive under the water and feel it closing over his 
head, they laughed at him, and said he was a fool. 
All he could say in reply was, ' You can't under- 
stand me ! ' ' Not understand you, indeed,' they 
replied in wrath ; and thrashed him. 

But he gradually grew older and stronger. One 
day he saw at a distance certain beautiful birds, 
snow-white, with magnificent wings. Impelled by 
something within him, he could not but fly towards 
them : though expecting to be repulsed and perhaps 
killed for his presumption. But suddenly looking 
into the lake below him, he beheld not the old ugly 
reflection; but something large, white, graceful. The 
beautiful birds hailed him as a companion. The 
stupid people had thought him an ugly duck, be- 
cause he was too good for them. They could not 
understand him : nor see the great promise of that 
uncouth aspect. The ugly duck proved to be a 
Swan ! 



Thoughts 071 Misplaced Men. 45 

He was not proud, that wise bird : but he was 
very happy. Now, everybody said he was the 
most beautiful of all beautiful birds : and he re- 
membered how, once upon a time, everybody had 
laughed at him and thrashed him. Yes : he was 
appreciated at his true value at last ! 

Possibly, my friendly reader, you have known 
various Ugly Ducks. Men who were held in little 
esteem, because they were too good for the people 
among whom they lived. Men who were held in 
little esteem, because it needed more wit than those 
around them possessed, to discern the makings of 
great and good things under their first unpromising 
aspect. When John Foster, many years ago, preach- 
ing to little pragmatic communities of uneducated, 
stupid, and self-conceited sectaries, was declared by 
old women and young whipper-snappers, to be A 
PERFECT FOOL ; he was an Ugly Duck of the first 
kind. When Keats published his earliest poetry; 
and when Mr. Gifibrd bitterly showed up all its 
extravagance and mawkishness, and positively re- 
fused to discern under all that, the faculties which 
would be matured and tamed into those of a true 
poet ; Keats was an Ugly Duck of the second kind. 
John Foster was esteemed an Ugly Duck at the 
time when he actually was a Swan, because the 
people who estimated him were such blockheads 
that they did not know a swan when they saw one 



4-6 Concerning Ugly Ducks : 

Keats was esteemed an Ugly Duck, because he 
really was an awkward, shambling, odd animal ; 
and his critic had not patience, or had not insight, 
to discern something about him that promised he 
would yet grow into that which a mere Duck could 
never be. For the creature which is by nature a 
Swan, and which will some day be known for such 
by all, may in truth be, at an early stage in its de- 
velopment, an uglier, more offensive, more impudent 
and forward, more awkward and more insufferable 
animal, than the creature which is by nature a Duck, 
and which will never be taken for anything more. 

Yes, many men, with the gift of genius in them : 
and many more, with no gift of genius but with a 
little more industry and ability than their fellows : 
are regarded as little better than fools by the peo- 
ple among whom they live ; more especially if they 
live in remote places in the country, or in little 
country towns. Some day, the Swans acknowledge 
the Ugly Duck for their kinsman : and then all the 
quacking tribe around him recognize him as a Swan. 
Possibly, indeed, even then, some of the neighbour- 
ing ducks who knew him all his life, and accord- 
ingly held him cheap till the world fixed his mark, 
will still insist that he is no more than an extremely 
Ugly Duck, whom people (mainly out of spite 
against the ducks who were his early acquaintances) 
persist in absurdly calling a Swan. I have beheld 
a Duck absolutely foam at the mouth, when I said 



Thoughts on Misplaced Men. 47 

' something implying that another bird (whose name 
you would know if I mentioned it) was a Swan. 
For the Duck, at College, had been a contemporary 
of the Swan : he had even played at marbles with 
the Swan, in boyhood : and so, though the Swan 
was quite fixed as being a Swan, the Duck never 
could bear to recognize him as such. On the con- 
trary, he held him as an overrated, impudent, purse- 
proud, conceited, disagreeable, and hideously Ugly 
Duck. I remember, too, a very venomous and ma- 
licious old Duck, who never had done anything but 
quack (in an envious and uncharitable way, too) 
through all the years which made him very old 
and exceedingly tough, giving an account of the 
extravagances and bombastic flights of a young 
Swan. The Duck vilely exaggerated the sayings 
of that youthful Swan. He put into the Swan's 
mouth words which the Swan had never uttered : 
and ascribed to the Swan sentiments (of a heretical 
character) which he very well knew the Swan ab- 
horred. But even upon the Duck's own showing, 
there was the promise of something fine about the 
injudicious and warm-hearted young Swan : and a 
little candour and a little honesty might have ac- 
knowledged this. And it appeared to me a poor 
sight, to behold the ancient Duck, with all his 
feathers turned the wrong way with spite, standing 
beside a dirty puddle, and stretching his neck, and 
gobbling and quacking out his impotent malice, as 



48 Concerning Ugly D ticks : 

the beautiful Swan sailed gracefully overhead, per- 
fectly unaware of the malignity he was exciting in 
the muscle which served the Duck for a heart. 

It makes me ferocious, I confess it, to hear a 
Duck, or a company of Ducks, abusing and vilifying 
a Swan. And a good many Ducks have a tendency 
so to do. If you ask one of very many Ducks, 
' What kind of a bird is A .'' ' (A being a Swan), the 
answer will be, ^ Oh, a very Ugly Duck ! ' If the 
present writer had the faintest pretension to be 
esteemed a Swan, he would not say this. But he 
knows, very well indeed, that he can pretend to no 
more than to plod humbly and laboriously along 
upon the earth, while other creatures sail through 
the empyrean. He has seen, with wonder, several 
ill-natured attacks upon himself in print, the grava- 
men of the charge against him being that he does 
not and cannot write like A, B, and C, who are great 
geniuses. Pray, Mr. Snarling, did he ever pretend 
to write like A, B, and C ? No : he pretends to no- 
thing more than to produce a homely material (with 
something real about it) that may suit homely folk. 
And so long as a great number of people are con- 
tent to read what he is able to write, you may rely 
upon it he will go on writing. As for you, Mr. 
Snarling, of course }^ou can write like A, B, and C. 
And in that case, your obvious course is to proceed 
to do so. And when you do so, you may be sure 
of this : that the present writer will never twist nor 



Thoughts on Misplaced Men. 49 

misrepresent your words, nor tell lies to your pre- 
judice. 

It is a curious and interesting spectacle, to witness 
two Ducks discussing the merits of a Swan. I have 
known a Duck attack a Swan in print. The Swan 
was an author. The Duck attacked the Swan on 
the ground that his style wanted elegance. And I 
assure you the attack, for want of elegance of 
style, was made in language not decently gram- 
matical. You may have heard a Duck attack a 
Swan in conversation. The Swan was a pretty girl. 
The charge was that the Swan's taste in dress was 
bad. You looked at the Duck, and were aware 
that the Duck's taste was execrable. Would that 
we could * see ourselves as others see us ! ' Then 
you would no longer see such sights as this, which 
we may have witnessed in our youth. Two Ducks 
viciously abusing a Swan, flying by : and pointing 
out that the Swan had lost an eye, also a foot : and 
with wearisome iteration, dwelling on those enor- 
mities. And when you looked carefully at the 
spiteful creatures, wagging their heads together, 
hissing and quacking, you were aware that (strange 
to say) each of them had but one foot and one eye, 
and that, in short, in every respect in which the 
Swan was bad, the Ducks were about fifty times 
worse. Thus you may have known a very small 
and shabby Duck, who scoffed at a noble Swan, 
because (as he said) the Swan had no logic. Yet 

E 



50 C oncer 7iing Ugly Ducks : 

whenever that Duck himself attempted to argue 
any question, he had but one course : which was, 
scandalously to misrepresent and distort something 
said by the man maintaining the other opinion ; and 
then to try to raise against that man a howl of 
heresy. Not indeed that that man, or any one of 
his friends, cared a brass farthing for what the 
shabby little Duck thought or said of him. Yet 
the Duck showed all the will to be a viper, though 
nature had constrained him to abide a Duck. And 
this was the Duck's peculiar logic. 

At this point the reader may pause, and ponder 
what has been said. If exhausted by the mental 
effort of attention, he may take a glass of wine. 
And then he is requested to observe, that the 
writer considers himself to have made but one step 
in advance since he finished the legend of the Ugly 
Duck, with which the present work commenced. 
That step in advance was to the Principle : 

That some men are held in little esti- 
mation BECAUSE THEY ARE TOO GOOD FOR THE 
PEOPLE AMONG WHOM THEY LIVE. These are my 
misplaced MEN. 

Of course, not all misplaced men are what I 
understand by Ugly Ducks. For there are men 
who are misplaced by being put in places a great 
deal too good for them. You may have known 
individuals who could not open their mouths but 
you heard the unmistakeable quack-qicack, who yet 



i 



Tho7ights on Misplaced Men. 5 r 

gave themselves all the airs of Swans. And pro- 
bably a good many people honestly took them for 
Swans : and other people, prudent, safe, and some- 
what sneaky people, pretended that they took them 
for Swans, while in fact they did not. And when 
perspicacious persons privately whispered to one 
another, ' That fellow Stuckup is only a duck,' it 
was because in fact he was no more. Yet Stuckup 
did not think himself so. I have not seen many 
remarkable human beings ; but I have studied a 
few with attention : and I can say, with sincerity, 
that the peculiar animal known as the Beggar on 
Horseback is by far the greatest and m^ost impor- 
tant human being I have ever known. Probably, 
my reader, you still hold your breath with awe, as 
you remember your first admission to the presence 
of a person whom you saw to be on horseback, but 
did not know to be a beggar who had attained that 
eminence. You afterwards learned the fact; and 
then you wondered you did not see it sooner. For 
now the beggar's dignity appeared to you to bear 
the like relation to that of the true man in such a 
place, that the strut of a king with a tinsel crown in 
a booth at a fair bears to the quiet assured air of 
Queen Victoria walking into the House of Lords to 
open Parliament. 

It is an unspeakable blessing for a man, that he 
should be put down among people who can under- 
stand him. For no matter whether a man is thought 



5 2 Concerning Ugly Ducks : 

a fool by his neighbours because he is too good for 
them, or because he is really a fool, the depressing 
effect upon his own mind is the same ; unless indeed 
he have the confidence which we might suppose 
would have gone with the head and heart of 
Shakspeare, if Shakspeare appreciated himself 
justly. Very likely he did not. John Foster, great 
man as he was, could not have liked to see the little 
meeting-houses at which he held forth gradually 
getting empty, as the people of the congregation 
went off to some fluent blockhead with powerful 
lungs and a vacuous head. For many a day Arch- 
bishop Whately of Dublin was a misplaced man : 
feared and suspected just because that clear head 
and noble heart were so high above the sympathy 
or even the comprehension of many of those over 
whom he was set. A bitter little sectary would 
have been, at first, an infinitely more popular Prelate. 
And the writer cannot refrain from saying with 
what delight, but a few months before that great 
man died, he saw, by the enthusiastic reception 
which the archbishop met, rising to make a short 
speech at a public meeting in Dublin of three 
thousand people, that justice was done him at last. 
He had found the place which was his due. They 
knew the noble Swan they had got : and knew that 
the honour he derived from the archiepiscopal 
throne, was as a sand-grain when compared with 
the honour which he reflected on it. Yet he found 



i 



Thoughts on Misplaced Men. 53 

the time hard to bear, when he was undervalued 
because he was too good : when men viHfied him 
because they could not understand him. ' I have 
tried to look as if I did not feel it,' he said ; ' but it 
has shortened my life.' Whereas our friend Carper, 
who for ten 3^ears past has held an eminent place 
for which he is about as fit as a cow, and which he 
has made ridiculous through his incompetence, — the 
wrong man in the wrong place, if such a thing ever 
was, — is entirely pleased with himself, and will 
never have his life shortened by any consideration 
of his outrageous Incapacity. There were years of 
Arnold's life at Rugby during which he was an 
unappreciated man, just because he rose so high 
above the ordinary standard. If the sun were 
something new, and if you showed it for the first 
time to a company of blear-eyed men, they would 
doubtless say it was a most disagreeable object. 
And if there were no people of thoughtful hearts 
and of refined culture in the world, the author of In 
Memoriavi would no doubt pass among mankind 
for a fool. There are people who, through a large 
part of their life, are above the high-water-mark of 
popular appreciation. Wordsworth was so. He 
needed * an audience fit;' and it for many a day 
was * few.' The popular taste had to be educated 
into caring for him : it was as if you had commanded 
a band of children to drink bitter ale and to like it. 
Even Jeffrey could write, 'This will never do!' 



54 Concerning Ugly Ducks : 

And you miss people as completely by shooting 
over their heads, as by hitting the ground a dozen 
yards on this side of them. A donkey, in all 
honesty, prefers thistles to pine-apple. Yet the 
poor pine-apple is ready to feel aggrieved. 

This misjudging of people, because they rise 
above the sphere of your judgment, begins early 
and lasts late. I have known a clever boy, under 
the authority of a tyrannical and uncultivated 
governor, who was savagely bullied and ignomini- 
ously ordered out of the room, because he declared 
that he admired the Hartleap Well. His governor 
declared that he was a fool, a false pretender, a 
villain. His governor sketched his future career by 
declaring that he would be hanged in this world, 
and sent to perdition in the next. All this was 
because he possessed faculties which his unculti- 
vated tyrant did not possess. It was as if a stone- 
deaf man should torture a lover of music because 
he ventured to maintain that there is such a thing 
as sound. It was as if a man whose musical taste 
was educated up to the point of admJring the Rat- 
caicJiers DatLghter, should vilipend and suspend by 
hemp a human being who should declare there was 
something beyond that in Beethoven and Mendels- 
sohn. And I believe that very often, thoughtful 
little children are subjected to the great trial of 
being brought up in a house where they are utterly 
misunderstood, by guardians and even by parents 



( 



TJioughts 071 Misplaced Men. 55 

quite unequal to understanding them. And this 
has a very souring effect on the little heart. There 
are boys and girls, living under their fathers' roof, 
who in their deepest thoughts are as thoroughly 
alone as if they dwelt at Tadmor in the Wilderness. 
There are children who would sooner go and tell 
their donkey what was most in their mind, than 
they would tell it to their father or their mother. 
In some cases, the lack of power to understand or 
appreciate becomes still more marked as childhood 
advances to maturity. You may have known a 
man, recognized by the world as a very wise man, 
for expressing to the world the self-same views and 
opinions whose expression had caused him to be 
adjudged a fool at home. ' Do you know, Charlotte 
has written a book ; and it's better than likely : ' 
was all the father of its author had to say about 
Jane Eyre. What a picture of a searing, blighting 
home atmosphere ! You cannot read the story with- 
out thinking of evergreens crisping up under a 
withering east wind of three weeks' duration. And 
I could point to a country, in Africa, where men, 
who would be recognized as great men elsewhere, 
are thought very little of : because there is hardly 
anybody who can appreciate them, and their attain- 
ments. I have known, there, an accomplished 
scholar, who in the neighbouring kingdom of Biafra 
would be made a clefrag (corresponding to our 
Bishop), who, living where he does, when spoken of 



56 Concerning Ugly Ducks : 

at all, is usually spoken of contemptuously as A 
DOMINIE ; corresponding to our schoolmaster or 
College tutor, but the undignified way of stating 
the fact. Such a man is a great Greek scholar : 
but if he dwell among Africans who know nothing 
earthly about Greek, and who care even less for it, 
what does it profit him ? Alas, for that misplaced 
man ! Thought an Ugly Duck because he lives at 
Heliopolis : while four hundred miles off, in the 
great University of Biafra, he would be hailed as a 
noble Swan, by kindred Swans ! 

Almost the only order of educated men who have 
it not in their power to live among educated folk, 
are the clergy. Almost all other cultivated men 
may choose for their daily companions people like 
themselves. But in the Church, you have doubt- 
less known innumerable instances in which men of 
very high culture were set down in remote rural 
districts, where there was not a soul with whom 
they had a thought in common within a dozen 
miles. It is all right, of course : in that broader 
sense in which everything is so : and doubtless the 
cure of souls, however rude and ignorant, is a work 
worthy of the best human heart and head that God 
ever made. Still, it is sad to see a razor somewhat 
inefficiently cutting a block, for which a great axe 
with a notched edge is the right thing. It is sad 
to see a cultivated, sensitive man, in the kind of 
parish where I have several times seen such. You 



k 



Thottghts on Misplaced Men. 57 

may be able to think of one, an elegant scholar, a 
profound theologian, a man of most refined taste, 
taken unhappily from the common-room of a College, 
and set down in a cold upland district, where there 
were no trees and where the wind almost invariably 
blew from the east : among people with high cheek- 
bones and dried-up complexions, of Radical politics 
and Dissenting tendencies, dense in ignorance and 
stupidity, and impregnable in self-confidence and 
self-conceit : and just as capable of appreciating 
their clergyman's graceful genius as an equal num- 
ber of cod-fish would be. And what was a yet 
more melancholy sight than even the sight of the 
first inconsistency between the man and his place, 
was the sight of the way in which the man year by 
year degenerated till he grew just the man for the 
place ; and only a middling man for it. Yes, it was 
miserable to see how the Swan gradually degene- 
rated into an Ugly Duck : how his views got morbid, 
and his temper ungenial, how his accomplishments 
rusted, and his conversational powers died through 
utter lack of exercise : till after a good many years 
you beheld him a soured, wrongheaded, cantan- 
kerous, petty, disappointed man. For luck was 
against him : and he had no prospect but that of 
remaining in the bleak upland parish, swept by the 
east wind, as long as he might live. And after a 
little while, he ceased entirely to go back to the 
University where he would have found fit associates: 



58 Concerning Ugly Ducks: 

and he grew so disagreeable that his old friends did 
not care to visit him, and listen to his moaning. 
Now, you cannot long keep much above what you 
are rated at. At least, you must have an iron con- 
stitution of mind if you do. I daresay sometimes 
in old days an honourable and good man was con- 
strained by circumstances to become a Publican : I 
mean, of course, a Jewish Publican. He meant to 
be honest and kind, even in that unpopular sphere 
of life. But when all men shied him : when his old 
friends cut him : when he was made to feel, daily, 
that in the common estimation Publicans and Sinners 
ranked together : I have no doubt earthly but he 
would sink to the average of his class. Or, as the 
sweetest wine becomes the sourest vinegar, he 
might not impossibly prove a sinner above all the 
other Publicans of the district. 

But not merely do ignorant and vulgar persons 
fail to appreciate at his true value a cultivated man : 
more than this : the fact of his cultivation may 
positively go to make vulgar and ignorant persons 
dislike and underrate him. My friend Brown is a 
clergyman of the Scotch Church, and a man who 
has seen a little of the world. Like most educated 
Scotchmen now-a-days, he speaks the English lan- 
guage if not with an English accent, at least with 
an accent which is not disagreeably Scotch. He 
does not call a boat a bott ; nor a horse a hoarrse ; 
nor philosophy philozzophy ; nor a road a rodd. 



Thotights on Misplaced Men. 59 

He does not pronounce the word is as if It were 
spelt eez, nor talk of a lad of speerit. Still less does 
he talk of salvahtion, justificahtion, sanctificahtion, 
and the like. He does not begin his church service 
by giving out either a sawm or a samm : in which 
two disgusting forms I have sometimes known the 
word psalm disguised. Brown told me that once 
on a time he preached in the church of a remote 
country parish, where parson and people were 
equally uncivilized. And after service the minister 
confided to him that he did not think the congrega- 
tion could have liked his sermon. '-Ye see/ said 
the minister, ' thawt's no the style o' langidge they're 
used wi'!' My friend replied, not without asperity, 
that he trusted it was not. But I could see, when 
he told me the story, that he did not quite like to 
be an Ugly Duck : that it irked him to think that, 
in fact, some vulgar boor with a different style o' 
langidge would have been much more acceptable 
to the people of Mufifburgh. I am very happy to 
believe that such parishes as Mufifburgh are becom- 
ing few : and that a scholar and a gentleman will 
rarely indeed find that he had better, for immediate 
popularity, have been a clodhopper and an ignora- 
mus. You have heard, no doubt, how a dissenting 
preacher in England demolished the parish clergy- 
man, in a discourse against worldly learning. The 
clergyman, newly come, was an eminent scholar. 
' Do ye think Powle knew Greek t ' said his opponent, 



6o Concerning Ugly Dticks : 

perspiring all over. And the people saw how useless 
and indeed prejudicial was the knowledge of that 
heathen tongue. 

And this reminds me that it will certainly make 
a man an Ugly Duck to be, in knowledge or learn- 
ing, in advance of the people among whom he lives. 
A very wise man, if he lives among people who are 
all fools, may find it expedient, like Brutus, to pass 
for a fool too. And if he knows two things or 
three which they don't know, he had better keep 
his information to himself. Even the possession of 
a single exclusive piece of knowledge may be a 
dangerous thing. Long ago, in an ancient Univer- 
sity near the source of the Nile, the professors of 
Divinity regarded not the quantity of Greek or 
Latin words. The length of the vowels they decided 
in each case according to the idea of the moment. 
And their pronunciation of Scripture proper names, 
if it went upon any principle at all, went on a wrong 
one. A youthful student, named McLamroch, was 
reading an essay in the class of one of these respect- 
able but antediluvian professors. And coming to 
the word Thessalonica, he pronounced it, as all 
mortals do, with the accent on the last syllable but 
one, and giving the vowel as long. * Say Thessa- 
ioanica,' said the venerable professor, with emphasis. 
' I think, doctissime professor (for all professors in 
that University were most learned by courtesy) 
that Thessalonica is the right way,' replied poor 



Thotights on Misplaced Men. 6i 

McLamroch. ' I tell you it is wrong,' shrilly shouted 
the good professor : ' Say Thessaloanica ! and let 
me tell you, Mr. McLamroch, you are most aboamin- 
ably affectit!' So poor McLamroch was put down. 
He was an Ugly Duck. And he found by sad 
experience, that it is not safe to know more than 
your professor. And I verily believe, that the 
solitary thing that McLamroch knew and his pro- 
fessor did not know, was the Avay to pronounce 
Thessalonica. I have heard, indeed, of a theological 
professor of that ancient day, who bitterly lamented 
the introduction of new fashions of pronouncing 
Scriptural proper names. However, he said, he 
could stand all the rest : but there were two render- 
ings he would never give up but with life. These 
were Kapper-nawm, by which he meant Caper- 
naum : and Levvy-awthan, by which he meant 
Leviathan. And if you, my learned friend, had 
been a student under that good man, and had pro- 
nounced these words as scholars and all others do, 
you would have found yourself no better than an 
Ugly Duck, and a fearfully misplaced man. A 
torrent of wiit, sarcasm at new lights, and indigna- 
tion at people who Avere not content to pronounce 
words (wrong) like their fathers before them, would 
have made you sink through the floor. 

To be in advance of your fellow-mortals in taste, 
too, is as dangerous as to be in advance of them in 
the pronunciation of Thessalonica. When Mr. Jones 



62 C oncer nmg Ugly Ducks : 

built his beautiful Gothic house, in a district where 
all other houses belonged to no architectural school 
at all, all his neighbours laughed at him. A genial 
friend, in a letter in a newspaper, spoke of his 
peculiar taste, and called him the preposterous Jones. 
And it was a current joke in the neighbourhood, 
when you met a friend, to say, ' Have you seen 
Jones's house ?' You then held up both hands, or 
exclaimed ' Well, I never ! ' Then your friend burst 
into a loud roar of laughter. In a severer mood, you 
would say, ' That fellow ! Can't he build like his 
fathers before him 1 Indeed he never had a grand- 
father : I remember how he was brought up by his 
aunt, that kept a cat's-meat shop in Muffburgh,' 
and the like. All this evil came upon Jones, be- 
cause he was a little in advance of his neighbours 
in taste. For in ten years, hardly a house round 
but had some steep gables, several bay windows, 
and a little stained glass. Their owners esteemed 
them Gothic. And in one sense, undoubtedly some 
of them were Gothic enough. In Scotland, now, 
people build handsome churches, and pay all due 
respect to ecclesiastical propriety. But it is not 
very long since a parish clergyman proposed to the 
authorities that a proper font should be provided for 
baptisms, because the only vessel heretofore used 
for that purpose was a crockery basin, used for wash- 
ing hands. And one of the authorities exclaimed 
indignantly, ' We are not going to have any gew- 



Thoughts on Misplaced Men. 63 

gaws in our church : ' by gewgaws meaning a de- 
corous font. What could be done with such a man? 
Violently to knock his head against a wall would 
have been wrong: for no man should be visited 
with temporal penalties on account of his honest 
opinions. Yet any less decided treatment would 
have been of no avail. 

We ought all to be very thankful, if we are in our 
right place : if we are set among people whom we 
suit, and who suit us : and among whom we need 
neither to practise a dishonest concealment of our 
views, nor to stand in the painful position of Ugly 
Ducks and Misplaced Men. Yes, a man may well 
be glad, if he is the square man in the square hole. 
For he might have been a round man in a square 
hole : and then he would have been unhappy in the 
hole, and the hole would have hated him. I know 
a place where a man who should say that he thought 
Catholic Emancipation common justice and com- 
mon sense, would be hooted down, even yet : would 
be told he was a villain, blinded by Satan. There 
is a locality, where morality indeed is very low, but 
where a valued friend of mine was held up to 
reprobation as a dangerous and insidious man, be- 
cause he declared in print that he did not think it 
sinful to take a quiet walk on Sunday. In that 
locality, one birth in every three is illegitimate : but 
it was pleasant and easy, by abuse of the Rector of 



64 Concerning Ugly Ducks : 

a London parish, and by abuse of others Hke him, 
to compound for the neglect of the duty of trying 
to break Hodge and Bill, Kate and Sally, of their 
evil ways. I know a place where you may find an 
intelligent man, out of a lunatic asylum too, who 
will tell you that to have an organ in church is to 
set up images and go back to Judaism. I have 
lately heard it seriously maintained that to make a 
decorous pause for a minute after service in church 
is over, and pray for God's blessing on the worship 
in which you have joined, is * contrary to reason 
and to Scripture ! ' I know places where any one 
of the plainest canons of taste, being expressed by 
a man, would be taken as stamping him a fool. 
Now what would you do, my friend, if you found 
yourself set down among people with whom you 
were utterly out of sympathy : whose first principles 
appeared to you the prejudices of pragmatic block- 
heads, and to whom your first principles appeared 
those of a silly and Ugly Duck ? One would say, 
If you don't want to dwarf and distort your whole 
moral nature, get out of that situation. But then 
some poor fellows cannot. And then they must 
either take rank as Misplaced Men ; or go through 
life hypocritically pretending to share views which 
they despise. The latter alternative is inadmissible 
in any circumstances. Be honest, whatever you do. 
Take your place boldly, as an Ugly Duck, if God 
has appointed that to be your portion in this life. 



I 



Thoughts on Misplaced Men. 65 

Doubtless, it will be a great trial. But you and I, 
friendly reader, set by Providence among people 
who understand us and whom we understand : 
among whom we may talk out our honest heart, 
and (let us hope) do so : in talking to whom we 
don't need to be on our guard, and every now and 
then to pull up, thinking to ourselves, ' Now this 
sneaking fellow is lying on the catch for my saying 
something he may go and repeat to my prejudice 
behind my back : ' how thankful w^e should be ! I 
declare, looking back on days that have been, in 
this very country, I cannot understand how manly, 
enlightened, and honest men lived then at all ! You 
must either have been a savage bigot, or a wretched 
sneak, or a martyr. The alternative is an awful 
one : but let us trust, my friend, that if you and I 
had lived then, we should by God's grace have 
been equal to it. Yes, I humbly trust that if we 
had lived then, we should either have been burned, 
hanged, or shot. For the days have been, in which 
that must have been the portion of an honest man, 
who thought for himself: and who would be dra- 
gooned by neither Pope, Prelate, nor Presbyter. 

But now, having written myself into a heat of 
indignation, I think it inexpedient to write more. 
For it appears to me that to write or to read an 
essay like this, ought always to be a relief and 
recreation. And those grave matters, which stir 

F 



66 Concerning Ugly Ducks. 

the heart too deeply, and tingle painfully through 
the nervous system, are best treated at other times, 
in other ways. Many men find it advisable to keep 
to themselves the subjects on which they feel most 
keenly. As for me, I dare not allow myself to 
think of certain evils of whose existence I know. 
Sometimes they drive one to some quiet spot, where 
you can walk up and down a little path with grass 
and evergreens on either hand, and try to forget the 
sin and misery you cannot mend : looking at the 
dappled shades of colour on the grass ; taking hold 
of a little spray of holly and poring upon its leaves ; 
stopping beside a great fir-tree, and diligently 
perusing the wrinkles of its bark. 

So we shut up. So we cave in. Oh the beauty 
of these simple phrases, so purely classic ! 




CHAPTER IV. 

OF THE SUDDEN SWEETENING OF 
CERTAIN GRAPES. 




ANY years since, on a sunshiny autumn 
day, a gentleman named Mr. Charles 
James Fox, a lawyer of eminence, was 
walking with his friend Mr. Mantrap through a vine- 
yard near Melipotamus. A vineyard in that region 
of the earth is not the shabby field of what look like 
stunted gooseberry bushes which you may see on 
the Rhine. For trellised on high from tree to tree 
there hung the ripe clusters, rich and red. One 
cluster, of especial size and beauty, attracted the 
attention of Mr. Fox. He had in his hand a walk- 
ing-stick (made of oak, varnished to a yellow hue) 
with a hook at its superior end. With this im- 
plement he sought to reach that cluster of grapes, 
with the view of appropriating it to his personal 
consumption, possibly upon the spot. But after 
repeated attempts, he found he could not in any 
way attain it. Upon this Mr. Fox, a man of ready 



68 Of the Sudden Sweetening of 

wit intellectually, but morally no more than an 
average human being, turned off the little disap- 
pointment by saying to his friend, ' Oh, bother : 
I believe the grapes are as sour as the disposition 
of Mr. Snarling/ The friends prosecuted their 
walk. But after they had proceeded a few miles, it 
occurred to Mr. Mantrap that Mr. Fox had depre- 
ciated the grapes because he could not reach them. 
Mr. Mantrap mentioned the occurrence to various 
acquaintances : and gradually it came to be, that 
in the circle of Mr. Fox's friends SOUR GRAPES grew 
a proverbial phrase, signifying anything a human 
being would like to get ; and, failing to get, cried 
down. 

These facts, now given to the public in an accu- 
rate fashion, were lately made the subject of a short 
narrative in a little volume of moral stories published 
by an individual whose name I do not mention. But 
by one of those misapprehensions which naturally 
occur when a story is conveyed by oral tradition, 
that gentleman (of whom I desire to speak with the 
utmost respect) represented that the person who 
acted in the way briefly described, was not Mr. C. 
J. Fox the eminent lawyer : but the well-known in- 
ferior animal which is termed a fox. A moment's 
thought may show how impossible it is to receive 
such a representation. For it is extremely doubtful 
whether a fox would care to eat grapes, even if he 
could get a cluster of the very finest : while the 



Certain Grapes. 



notion that such an animal could express his ideas 
in articulate language, is one which could not pos- 
sibly be received unless by illiterate persons residing 
at a great distance from a University town. 

Should the reader have had any difficulty in 
grasping the full meaning of what has been said, it 
is requested that he should pause at this point, and 
read the preceding paragraphs a second or even a 
third time, before proceeding further. 

Sometimes, in this world, people dishonestly say 
that the grapes they have failed to reach are sour, 
though knowing quite well that the grapes are 
sweet. In this case, these people desire to conceal 
their own disappointment ; and (if possible) to make 
the value of the grapes less to such as may ulti- 
mately get them. Sometimes, in this world, when 
people have done their best to reach the grapes and 
failed, they come to honestly believe that the grapes 
are sour. They do, in good faith, cease to care for 
them : and resign their mind quite cheerfully to 
doing without them. But there is no reckoning up 
the odd ways in which the machinery of thought 
and feeling within human beings works : and it is 
the purpose of the present dissertation to notice 
two of these. 

One is, that when you get the grapes, and spe- 
cially if you get them too easily, the grapes are apt, 
if not exactly to grow sour, yet in great measure to 



70 Of the Sudden Sweetening of 

lose their flavour. When you fairly get a thing, 
you do not care for it so much. Many people have 
lately been interested and touched by a truthful re- 
presentation in the pages of a very graceful, natural, 
and pure writer of fiction, whose pages (I have 
learned with some surprise) various worthy people 
think it wrong to read. That graceful and excel- 
lent writer shows us how a certain young man 
sought the love of a certain young woman : and 
how when that young man (not a noble or worthy 
man indeed) found the love of that poor girl given 
him so fully and unreservedly, he came not to care 
for it, and to think he might have done better. Lead 
him out and chastise him, my friend : and having 
done so, look into your own heart, and see whether 
there be anything like him. If you be a wise per- 
son, you may find reason severely to flagellate 
yourself For it is the ungrateful and unworthy 
way of average human nature, to undervalue the 
blessings God gives us, if they come too cheaply 
and easily. Even Bruce, at the source of the Nile, 
thought to himself, ^ Is this all } ' And Gibbon, look- 
ing out upon the Lake of Geneva after writing the 
last lines of the Decline and Fall, tells us how he 
thought and felt in like manner. 

This, however, is not my special subject. My 
subject is also connected with grapes : but it is a 
different phenomenon to which I solicit the reader's 
rapt and delighted attention. It is, how suddenly 



Certain Grapes. ji 

certain grapes grow sweet, when you find you can 
get them. You had no estimate at all of these grapes 
before : or you even thought them sour. But sud- 
denly you find the hook at the end of your walking- 
stick can reach them : suddenly you find you can 
get them : and now you judge of them quite dif- 
ferently. 

Many young women have thought, quite honestly : 
and perhaps have said, in the injudicious way in 
which inexperienced people talk : that they would 
not marry such and such a man upon any account. 
But some fine afternoon, the man in question asked 
them : and to the astonishment of their friends (some 
of whom would have been glad to do the like them- 
selves), the young ladies gladly accepted the human 
being, held in such unfavourable estimation before. 
It just made all the difference, to find that the thing 
could be got. They began, all at once, to have 
quite a difi"erent estimate of the man : to think of 
him and of his qualifications in quite a difi"erent 
way. The grapes suddenly grew sweet. And in- 
stead of being contumeliously cast into the ditch, 
they were eaten with considerable satisfaction. 

Even so have young clergymen, fresh from the 
University, thought that they would not on any 
account take such a small living, or such a shabby 
church : and in a little while been very thankful to 
get one not so good. And I do not mean at present, 
in the case of either the young women or the young 



72 Of the Sudden Sweetening of 

preachers, that they learn humbler ideas of them- 
selves as time goes on, and come to lowlier expec- 
tations. That, of course, is true : but my present 
assertion is, that in truth when the thing is put 
within their reach, they come to think more highly 
of it : they come to see all its advantages and 
merits : they are not merely resigned to take it : 
they are glad to get it. Many a man is now in a 
place in life, and very content and thankful to be 
there, which he would have repudiated the notion 
of his accepting, very shortly before he accepted it 
with thankfulness. 

The truth is, that if you look carefully, and look 
for some length of time, into the character of almost 
anything that is not positively bad, you will see a 
great deal of good about it. Friends in my own 
calling, do you not remember how, in your student 
days, you used to look at the shabby churches of 
our native land, when shabby churches are (alas !) 
the rule, and decorous ones the exception : and how 
you wondered then how their incumbents could 
stand them } You thought how much it would 
add to the difficulty of conducting public worship 
worthily, to be obliged to do it under the cross- 
influence of a dirty dilapidated barn, with a mass 
of rickety pews, where every arrangement would 
jar distressingly upon the whole nervous system of 
every man with a vestige of taste. You remember 
how your heart sunk as you looked at the vile 



Certam Grapes. 73 

waggon-roofed meeting-house in a dirty village 
street, with no churchyard at all round it ; or with 
the mangy, weedy, miserable-looking pound which 
even twenty years since was in many places thought 
good enough for the solemn sleep of the redeemed 
body, still united to the Saviour. And you remem- 
ber how earnestly you hoped that you might be 
favoured so highly as to attain a parish where the 
church was a building at least decent; and if pos- 
sible fairly ecclesiastical. And yet, it is extremely 
likely you got a remarkably shabby church for 
your first one : and it is in the highest degree pro- 
bable that in a little you got quite interested in it, 
and thought it really very good. Of course, when 
my friend Mr. Snarling reads this, he will exclaim, 
What, is not the clergyman's work so weighty, that 
it ought not to matter to him in the least what the 
mere outward building is like } Is not the spiritual 
church the great thing : may not God be worshipped 
in the humblest place as heartily as in the noblest "> 
And I reply to that candid person, who never mis- 
represented anyone, and who never said a good word 
of anyone, — Yes, my acquaintance : I remember all 
that. But still I hold that little vexatious external 
circumstances have a great effect in producing a 
feeling of irritation the reverse of devotional : and 
I believe that we poor creatures, with our wander- 
ing thoughts and our cold hearts, are much more 
likely to worship in spirit, if we are kept free from 



74 Of the Sudden Sweetening of 

such unfriendly influences : and if our worship be 
surrounded by all the outward decency and so- 
lemnity which are attainable. Give us a decorous 
building, I don't ask . for a grand one : give us 
quietude and order in all its arrangements : give us 
church music that soothes and cheers and brings 
us fresh heart : give us an assemblage of seem- 
ingly devout worshippers. And these things being 
present, I do not hesitate to say that the average 
worshipper will be far more likely to offer true spi- 
ritual worship, than in places to which I could 
easily point, where the discreditable building and 
the slovenly service are an offence and a mortifica- 
tion to everyone with any sense of what is fit. 

This, however, is by the bye. I could say much 
more on the subject. But I remember, thankfully, 
that it is a subject on which all educated persons 
now think alike, everywhere. It did not use to be 
so, once. 

But not merely as regards churches, but as re- 
gards most other things : my principle holds true, 
that if you look carefully and for some time into the 
qualifications of almost anything not positively bad, 
you will discern a great deal of good about it. Take 
a very ordinary-looking bunch of grapes : take even 
a bunch of grapes which appears sour at a cursory 
glance : look at it carefully for a good while, with 
the sense that it is your own ; and it will sweeten 
before your eyes. You pass a seedy little country 



Certain Grapes. 75 

house, looking like a fourth-rate farm-house : you 
think, and possibly say, (If the man who lives in it 
be a friend of your own,) that it is a wretched hole. 
The man who lives in It has very likely persuaded 
himself that It is a very handsome and attractive 
place. '■ What kind of manse have you got 1 ' said 
my friend Smith to a certain worthy clergyman. 
* Oh, it Is a beautiful place,' was the prompt reply. 
It was In fact a dismal weather-stained whitewashed 
erection, without an architectural feature, with hardly 
a tree or an evergreen near it, standing on a bleak 
hill-side. Smith heard the reply with great plea- 
sure ; feeling thankful that by God's kind appoint- 
ment a sensible man's own grapes seem sweet to 
him, which appear sour to everybody else ; and to 
nobody sourer than to himself, before they became 
his own. The only wonder Smith felt was, that the 
good minister's reply had not been stronger. He 
was prepared to hear the good man say, * Oh, it is 
the most beautiful place In Scotland ! ' For people 
in general cannot express their appreciation of 
things, without introducing comparisons; and Indeed 
superlatives. If a man's window commands a fine 
view, he is not content to say that it does command 
a fine view : No, It commands '■ the finest view in 
Britain.' If a human being has an attack of Illness, 
about a hundredth part as bad as hundreds of peo- 
ple endure every day, that human being will proba- 
bly be quite indignant unless you recognize it as a 



76 Of the Sudden Sweetening of 

fact, that nobody ever suffered so much before. 
Take an undistinguished volume from your shelves: 
read it carefully in your leisure hours for several 
evenings : and that undistinguished volume will be- 
come (in your estimation) an important one. My 
friend Smith, when he went to his country parish, 
was obliged for several months to have his books in 
large packing-boxes, his study not being ready to 
receive them. He lived in a lonely rural spot, for 
many wintry weeks, all alone. It was a charming 
scene around, indeed : warm with green ivy and 
yews and hollies through the brief daylight: but 
dreary and solitary through the long dark evenings 
to a man accustomed to gas-lit streets. Soon after 
settling there. Smith chanced to draw forth from a 
box a certain volume, which had remained for 
months in his bookcase unnoted: one among many 
more, all very like. And on every Sunday evening 
of that solitary time, Smith read in that volume. 
He read with pleasure and profit. Ever since then, 
he has thought the book a valuable and excellent 
one. It is distinguished among his books as the 
Bishop of Anywhere is among five hundred other 
clergymen : not that he is a whit wiser or better, 
but that he has been accidentally made more con- 
spicuous. When Smith turns over its leaves now, 
the moaning of January winds through the pine 
wood comes back ; and the brawl of a brook, winter- 
flooded. In brief, that cluster of grapes suddenly 



Certain Grapes. "jj 

sweetened, because its merits were fairly weighed. 
If a thing be good at all, look at it and examine it, 
and it will seem better. 

Now, a thing you have no chance of getting, you 
never seriously weigh the merits of When you re- 
ceive a half offer of a place in life, it is quite fair for 
you to say, ' Offer it fairly, and I shall think of it' 
You cannot take the trouble of estimating it now. 
It is a laborious and anxious thing to make up your 
mind in such a case. You must consider, and count 
up, and weigh, possibly a great number of circum- 
stances. You do not choose to undergo that fatigue, 
perhaps for no result. And if you be in perplexity 
what to do, the balance may be turned just by the 
fact that the thing is attainable. Hence the truth 
of that true proverb, that Faint heart never won fair 
lady. If you are fond of Miss Smith, and wish to 
marry her, don't speculate at home whether or not 
she will have you. Go and ask her. Your asking 
may be the very thing that will decide her to have 
you. And you, patron or electors of some little 
country parish which is vacant, don't say ' We need 
never offer it to such and such an eminent preacher: 
he would never think of it ! ' Go and try him. Per- 
haps he may. Perhaps you may catch him just at 
a time when he is feeling weary and exhausted : 
when he is growing old : when your offer may recall 
with fresh beauty the green fields and trees amid 
which he once was young : when he is sighing for a 



"]% Of the Sudden Sweetening of 

little rest. I could point out instances, more than 
one or two, in England and in Scotland, in which a 
bold offering of a bunch of grapes to a distinguished 
human being, induced him to accept the grapes : 
though you would have fancied, beforehand, that 
they would have been no temptation to him. I 
have known a man who (in a moral sense) refused 
a pine-apple, afterwards accept a turnip ; and like it. 
We have all heard of a good man who might have 
lived in a palace, holding a position of great rank 
and gain, and of very easy duty; who put that 
golden cluster of grapes aside : and by his own free 
choice went to a place of hard work and little fame 
or profit, to remain there one of the happiest as well 
as one of the noblest and most useful of humankind ! 
And the only way in which I can account for various 
marriages, is by supposing that the grapes sud- 
denly grew irresistibly sweet, just when it appeared 
that they could be had. You may have known a 
fair young girl quite willingly and happily marry a 
good old creature, whom you would have said a 
priori she was quite sure to refuse. But when the 
old creature made offer of his faded self (and his 
unfaded possessions), the whole thing offered ac- 
quired a sudden value and beauty. He might be 
an odd stick ; but then his estate had most beauti- 
ful timber. Intellectually and morally he might be 
inferior, or even deficient: but then his three per 
cents, formed a positive quantity, of enormous 



Certain Grapes. 79 

amount. The whole thing offered had to be re- 
garded as one bunch of grapes. And if some of the 
grapes were sour and shrivelled, a greater number 
of them was plump and juicy. 

Nobody who reads this page really knows whether 
he would like to be Lord Chancellor, or to live in 
a house like Windsor Castle. The writer has not 
the faintest idea whether he would like to be Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury. We never even ourselves to 
such things as these. We don't seriously consider 
whether the grapes are sweet or sour, which there is 
not the faintest possibility of our ever reaching. 
When Mr. Disraeli (as he himself said in Parliament) 
'would have been very thankful for some small 
place,' he had never lifted his eyes to the leadership 
of a certain great political party. Of that lofty 
cluster he had no estimate then : but the modest 
little bunch of twelve hundred a-year seemed attain- 
able, and so seemed sweet. But he was a great man 
when he said ' I am very glad now I did not get 
it ! ' He was destined to something bigger, and 
loftier. And when that greater position at last 
loomed in view, and became possible, became likely, 
— we can well believe that the great orator began 
to estimate it : and that it became an object of 
honourable ambition when it was very near, and was 
all but grasped. When the prize is within reach, it 
becomes precious. When the Atlantic cable was 
being laid, you can think how precious it would 



8o Of the Sudden Sweetening of 



seem when the vessels which were laying it had got 
within a mile or two of land. Yes, success, just 
within our grasp, grows inestimably valuable. The 
cluster of grapes, long striven after, and now at 
length just got hold of, — how sweet it seems ! 

My friend Mr. Brown had often remarked to me, 
* If ever there was a hideous erection on the face of 
the earth, it is that St. Sophia s Church : and I 
don't know a man less to be envied than the incum- 
bent of so laborious and troublesome a parish.' 
Brown and I were sitting on the wall of his beauti- 
ful churchyard in the country, one fine summer day, 
when he made this remark ; adding, ' How much 
happier a life we have here in this pure air and 
among these sweet fields ' (and indeed the fragrance 
of the clover was very delightful that day) : ' and 
with our kindly, well-behaved country people ! ' I 
need hardly mention, that Mr. Brown shortly after- 
wards succeeded to the vacant charge of St. Sophia's, 
a huge church in a great city. He was offered it in 
a kind way : saw its claims and advantages in a new 
light : accepted it, and is very happy in it. And 
recently he recalled to my memory his former 
estimate of it, and said how mistaken it was. He 
even added, that although the architecture of St. 
Sophia's was not the purest Gothic (it is in fact not 
Gothic at all), still there is a simple grandeur about 
it, which produces a great effect upon the mind 
when you grow accustomed to it. ^ I used to laugh/ 



Certain Grapes. 



he said, ' at poor old Dr. Log when he declared it 
was the finest church in Britain : but, do you know, 
some of its proportions are really unrivalled. Here, 
for instance, look at that arch,' — and then he went 
on at considerable length. The truth was, that the 
grapes had suddenly sweetened. The position, 
never thought of, or thought of only as quite 
unattainable, was a very different thing now. 

I do not for a moment suppose any insincerity 
on the part of my friend. He quite sincerely es- 
teemed the grapes as sour, when they hung beyond 
his reach. He quite sincerely esteemed them as 
sweet, when he came to know them better. But, as 
a general rule, whenever any man or woman under- 
values and despises something which average human 
nature prizes and enjoys, we may say that if the 
grapes are fairly put within reach, they would sud- 
denly and greatly sweeten. I speak of average 
human nature. There are exceptional cases. There 
is a great and good man who did not choose to be a 
Bishop ; who did not choose to be an Archbishop. 
The test is, that he was offered these places and 
refused them. But there are a great many men, 
who could quite honestly say that they don't want 
to be Bishops or Archbishops. But then they have 
not been tried : and there are some that I should 
not like to try. I believe the lawn would brighten 
into effulgence, when it was offered. The oppor- 
tunity of usefulness would appear so great, that it 

G 



82 Of the Sudden Sweetening of 

could not in conscience be refused. The grapes 
being within reach, would grow so sweet, that those 
good men would forget their old professions, and 
(in the words of Lord Castlereagh) turn their backs 
upon themselves. 

Perhaps you have known a refined young lady 
of thirty-nine years, who looked with disdain at her 
younger female friends when they got married. She 
wondered at their weakness in getting spoony about 
any man : and despised their flutter of interest in 
the immediate prospect of the wedding-day and all 
its little arrangements. The whole thing — trous- 
seau, cards, favours, cake — was contemptible. Per- 
haps you have known such a mature young lady 
get married herself at last : and evince a pride and 
an exhilaration in the prospect such as are rarely 
seen. It was delightful to witness the maidenly 
airs of the individual to whom the bunch of grapes 
had finally become attainable : the enthusiastic 
affection she testified towards the romantic hero 
(weighing sixteen stone) to whom she had given her 
young affections : the anguish of perplexity as to 
the material and fashion of the wedding-dress : in 
short, the sudden sweetening of the grapes which 
had previously been so remarkably sour. There is 
nothing here to laugh at : it is a beneficent provi- 
dential arrangement. In all walks of life you may 
have remarked the same. You may have known 
a hard-featured and well-principled servant, who, 



Certain Grapes. 8 



J 



having no admirer, gave herself out as a man-hater, 
and beHeved herself to be one. But some one turn- 
ing up who (let us hope) admired and appreciated 
her real excellence, that admirable young woman 
grew quite tremendous : first, in her pride and ex- 
ultation that she had a beau ; and secondly, in her 
admiration and fondness for him. Yes : turn out 
human nature with a pitch-fork ; and it will come 
back again. 

Perhaps you have known a wealthy old gentle- 
man, living quietly somewhere in the City (let the 
word be understood in its Cockney sense), and 
going into no society whatever; who frequently 
professed to despise the vanities to which other folk 
attach importance. He utterly contemned such 
things as a fine house, a fashionable neighbourhood, 
titled acquaintances and the like. And he did it 
all, quite sincerely. But nature had her way at 
last. That wealthy gentleman bought a house in 
an aristocratic West End square. His elation at 
finding himself there was pleasing, yet a little irri- 
tating. He could not refrain from telling everyone 
that he lived there. Occasionally he would cut 
short a conversation with a City acquaintance, by 
stating that he ' must be home to dinner at half- 
past seven in Berkeley Square.' He speedily in- 
formed himself of the precise social standing of 
every inhabitant of that handsome quadrangle : and 
would even produce the ' Court Guide ' and tell an 



84 Of the Sudde7i Sweetening of 

occasional visitor about the rank and connections of 
each name in the square. The delight with which 
he beheld a peer at his dinner-table may be con- 
ceived but not described. The grapes, in fact, had 
in all sincerity been esteemed as sour till he got 
possession of them. Then, all of a sudden, they 
became inconceivably sweet. So you may have 
beheld a plain respectable man, who had made a 
considerable fortune in the oil trade, buy a property 
in the country and settle there. ' I want nothing to 
do with your stuck-up gentry,' said that respectable 
man : ' I shall keep by my old friends Smith, 
Brown, and Robinson, who were apprentices with 
old McOily along with me, forty years ago.' But 
when the carriage of the neighbouring baronet 
drove up to the worthy man's door to call, it and 
its inmates were received with enthusiasm. There 
was, after all, a refinement of manner and feeling 
about gentle blood, not possessed by Smith and the 
others : and after a little intercourse with the family 
of the baronet and with other similar families, poor 
Smith, Brown, and Robinson got so chilly a recep- 
tion at the country house, and were so infuriated by 
the frequent mention and the high laudation of the 
landed families about (whom Smith and his friends 
did not know at all), that these old acquaintances 
quite dropped off; and the good old oil-merchant 
was left to the enjoyment of the grapes, formerly 
so sour and now so sweet. It is all in human 



Certain Gimpes. 85 

nature. You may have known a cultivated man, 
with a small income, living in a city of very rich 
and not remarkably cultivated men. You may have 
heard him speak Avith much contempt of mere vul- 
gar wealth, and of certain neighbours who possessed 
it. And you felt how easily that cultivated man 
might be led to change his tune. I have witnessed 
a parallel case. Once upon a time, the writer was 
walking along a certain country road ; a walk of 
nine miles. He overtook a little boy, walking 
along manfully by himself : a little fellow of seven 
years old. The two wayfarers proceeded together 
for several miles, conversing of various subjects. It 
appeared in the course of conversation, that the 
little boy, whose parents are very poor, never had 
any pocket-money. I don't believe he ever had a 
penny to spend, in all his life. He stated that he 
did not care for money ; nor for the good things (in 
a child's sense of that phrase) which might be 
bought with it. And parting from the little man, I 
could not but tip him a shilling. Every human 
being who will ever read this page v/ould of course 
have done the same. It was his very first shilling. 
He tried to receive it with philosophic composure, 
as if he did not care a bit about it. But he tried 
with little success. It was easy to see how different 
a thing a shilling had suddenly grov\-n. The grape^ 
had all at once sweetened. 

But it is the same way everywhere. An author 



S6 Of the Siidden Sweetening of 

without popular estimation thinks he can do quite 
well without it : he does not care for it. ' The 
world knows nothing of its greatest men ; ' nor, let 
us add, of its best. Yet popular favour proves very 
pleasant, when it comes at last. So a barrister 
without briefs does not want them or value them; 
till they come. So with the schoolboy who does not 
care for prizes : so with the student at college whose 
prize essays fail, through the incompetence of the 
judges. So (I fear) with the very intellectual 
preacher who would rather have his church empty 
than full : and who (at present) thinks that only the 
stupid and blinded are likely to attend a church 
where all the seats are occupied. I have known 
clever young fellows, more than two or three, who 
at a very earily age had outgrown all ambition : 
men who had in them the makings of great things, 
but by free choice took to a quiet and unnoted 
life : men whose University standing had been un- 
rivalled, but who instead of aiming at like eminence 
afterwards, took to. gardening, to evergreens and 
grass and trees : to contented walks through winter 
fields : to preaching to fifty rustic labourers : to 
reading black letter books in chambers at the 
Temple, instead of trying for the Great Seal : quite 
happy, and quite sincere in thinking and saying 
they did not care for more eminent places. But at 
length, perhaps, success and eminence come : and 
they are very glad and pleased. Their views of 



Certain Grapes. 



these things are quite changed. They see that 
they can be more useful than they are. They 
feel that there was a good deal of indolent self- 
indulgence in the life they had been leading : that 
there is more in this life than to practise a refined 
Epicureanism, — at least while strength and spirits 
suffice for more. The day may come, when these 
shall be worn out : and then the old thing will 
again be pleasant. 

Let us hear the sum of the whole matter. If 
there be anything in this world, which is in its 
nature agreeable to average humanity, yet which 
you think sour ; the likelihood is that if you got it 
it would grow sweet. You cannot finally turn out 
nature. Though you may mow it down very tightly, 
it will grow again, as grass does in the like contin- 
gency. And if there be in you evil and unworthy 
tendencies which by God's grace you have resolved 
to extirpate, you must keep a constant eye upon 
them. You must knock them on the head not once 
for all ; but daily and hourly. 

There are things, perhaps, which you know you 
would like so much, yet which are so unattainable, 
that you will not allow yourself to think of them. 
That way lies your safety. If you allowed yourself 
to dwell upon them, and upon their pleasures and 
advantages, you would grow discontented with what 
you have. So, though you cannot help sometimes 
casting a hasty glance at the cluster of grapes, 



Of the Sudden Sweetening of 



hanging high, which you would Hke, but which you 
will never have, — yet don't look long at it. Don't 
sit down, and contemplate it for a good while from 
various points of view, and think how much you 
would like it. That will only make you unhappy. 
And if you have known this world long, then you 
kn6w this about it : that the thing you would like 
best is just the last you are ever likely to get. But 
of this I shall say no more. I said something like 
it once before : and got a shower of long letters 
controverting it. 

If a young fellow fails in his profession : and then 
say he did not want to succeed ; let us believe him. 
He is entitled to this. We do him, in most cases, 
no more than justice. The grapes have indeed 
grown sour : and it is a kind appointment of Provi- 
dence that it is so. But if success should come yet, 
you will find them sweeten again, surprisingly. 

In writing upon this subject, I have been led to 
think of many things : and to think of many old 
acquaintances. Not very cheerfully did the writer 
trace out the first page : still less so the last. How 
sadly short has many a one of whom we expected 
great things, fallen of those expectations ! Is there 
one, of the clever boys and thoughtful lads, that 
has done as much as we looked for .? Not one. 

The great thing, of course, that resigns one to 
this, and to anything else, is the firm belief that 



Certain Grapes. 



God orders all. ' It had pleased God to form 
poor Ned, A thing of idiot mind,' wrote Southey. 
There the matter is settled. We have not a word 
more to say. ' I was dumb ; I opened not my 
mouth : BECAUSE THOU DIDST IT ! ' 

We have all smiled at the fable of ^sop, of 
which the writer has given you the accurate version : 
and smiled at many manifestations we have seen in 
life, showing its truth ; and showing us how human 
nature age after age abides the self-same thing. I 
believe it is one of the most beneficent arrangements 
of God's providential government, that the grapes 
we cannot reach grow sour. But for that, this would 
be a world of turned heads and broken hearts. 
Who has got the purple clusters he in his childhood 
thought to get .'' Yet who (if a sensible mortal) 
cares } You were to have been a laurelled hero : 
you are in fact a half-pay captain, glad to be made 
adjutant of a militia regiment. You were to have 
been Lord Chancellor of Great Britain : you are in 
fact parish minister of Drumsleekie, with a smoky 
manse, and heritors who oppose the augmentation 
of your living. You were to have lived in a grand 
castle, possibly built of alternate blocks of gold and 
silver : you live, in fact, in a plain house in a street, 
and find it hard enough to pay the Christmas bills. 
And you were to have been buried, at last, in West- 
minster Abbey : while in fact you won't. But the 



90 On Certain Grapes. 

beauty has faded off the things never to be at- 
tained; and the humble grapes you could reach 
have sweetened : and you are content. Yet there 
are grapes which, if submitted to your close in- 
spection, would seem so sweet that in comparison 
with them those you have would seem very in- 
sipid : so you may be glad you will never see those 
grapes too near nor too long. 




CHAPTER V. 

CONCERNING THE ESTIMATE OF 
HUMAN BEINGS, 




HE other day, talking with my friend 
Smith, I Incidentally said something which 
Implied that a certain Individual, who may 
be denoted as Mr. X, was a distinguished and In- 
fluential man. ' Nonsense ! ' was Smith's prompt 
reply. ' I saw Mr. X,' continued Smith, 'at a public 
meeting yesterday. He Is a gorilla — a yahoo. He 
is a dirty and ugly party. I heard him make a 
speecli. He has a horribly vulgar accent, and an 
awkward cubbish manner. In short, he Is not a 
gentleman ; nor the least like one I ' 

And having said this, my friend Smith thought 
he had finally disposed of X. 

But I replied, ' I grant all that. All you have 
said about X Is true. But still I say he Is a dis- 
tinguished and Influential man ; a very able man — 
almost a great man.' 

Smith was not convinced. He departed. I fear 



92 Concerning the Estimate of 

I have gone down in his estimation. I have not 
seen him since. Perhaps he does not want to see 
me. I don't care. 

But my friend Smith's observations have made 
me think a good deal of a tendency which is in 
human nature. It is very natural, if we find a man 
grossly deficient in something about which we are 
able to judge — and perhaps in the thing about 
which we are able best to judge — to conclude that 
he must be all bad. In the judgment of many, it 
is quite enough to condemn a man, to show that 
he is a low fellow, with an extremely vulgar accent. 
We forget how much good may go with these evil 
things ; good more than enough to outweigh all 
these and more. There is great difficulty in bring- 
ing men heartily to admit the great principle which 
may be expressed in the familiar words — FoR Bet- 
ter FOR Worse. There is great difficulty in 
bringing men really to see that excellent qualities 
may coexist with grave faults; and that a man, 
with very glaring defects, may have so many great 
and good qualities, as serve to make him a good 
and eminent man, upon the balance of the whole 
account. Though you can show that A owes a 
hundred thousand pounds, this does not certainly 
show that A is a poor man. Possibly A may pos- 
sess five hundred thousand pounds ; and so the ba- 
lance may be greatly in his favour. 

We all need to be reminded of this. It is very 



Human Beings. 93 

plain; but it is just very plain things that most of 
us practically forget. There are many folk who 
instantly on discovering that A owes the hundred 
thousand pounds, proceed to declare him a bank- 
rupt without further enquiry. Possibly the debt A 
owes is constantly and strongly pressed on your 
attention ; while it costs some investigation to be 
assured of the large capital he possesses. There is 
one debt in particular, which if we find owed by 
any man, it is hard to prevent ourselves declaring 
him a bankrupt, without more investigation. Great 
vulgarity will commonly stamp a man in the esti- 
mation of refined people, whatever his merits may 
be. That is a thing not to be got over. If a man 
be deficient by that hundred thousand pounds, all 
the gold of Ophir will (in the judgment of many) 
leave him poor. Once, in my youth, I beheld an 
eminent preacher of a certain small Christian sect. 
I knew he was an eloquent orator, and that he was 
greatly and justly esteemed by the members of his 
own little communion. I never heard him speak, 
and never beheld him save on that one occasion. 
But, sitting near him at a certain public meeting, I 
judged, from obvious indications, that he never had 
brushed his nails in his life. I remember well how 
disgusted I was ; and how hastily I rushed to the 
conclusion that there was no good about him at all. 
Those territorial and immemorial nails hid from 
my youthful eyes all his excellent qualities. Of 



94 Concerning the Estimate of 

course, this was because I was very foolish and 
inexperienced. Men with worse defects may be 
great and good upon the whole. Or, to return to 
my analogy, no matter how great a man's debts 
may be, you must not conclude he is poor till you 
ascertain what his assets are. These may be so 
great as to leave him a rich man, though he owes a 
hundred thousand pounds. 

The principle which I desire to enforce is briefly 
this : — that men must be taken /(^r better for worse. 
There may be great drawbacks about a thing, and 
yet the thing may be good. Many people think, 
in a confused sort of way, that if you can mention 
several serious objections to taking a certain course, 
this shows you should not take that course. Not at 
all. Look to the other side of the account. Possi- 
bly there are twice as many and twice as weighty 
objections to your not taking that course. There 
are things about your friend Smith that you don't 
like. They worry you. They point to a conclusion 
which might be expressed in the following propo- 
sition : — 

Smith is bad. 

But if you desire to arrive at a just and sound 
estimate of Smith, your course will be to think 
of other things about Smith, which speak in a dif- 
ferent strain. There are things about Smith you 
cannot help liking and respecting him for. And 
these point to a conclusion which a man of a com- 



Human Beings. 95 

prehensive mind and of considerable knowledge of 
the language might express as follows : — 

Smith is good. 

And having before you the things which may be 
said/r*? and con, it will be your duty first to count 
them, and then to weigh them. Counting alone will 
not suffice. For there may be six things which tell 
against Smith, and only three in his favour; and 
yet the three may be justly entitled to be held as 
outweighing the six. For instance, the six things 
counting against Smith may be these : — 

1. He has a red nose. 

2. He carries an extremely baggy cotton um- 
brella. 

3. He wears a shocking bad hat. 

4. When you make any statement whatever in 
his hearing, he immediately begins to prove, by ar- 
gument, that your statement cannot possibly be true. 

5. He says tremcndiLOtLs when he means ti'cmen- 
dous; and talks of 2. prizenter when he means a 
precentor. 

6. He is constantly saying * How very curious ! ' 
also 'Goodness gracious!' 

Whereas the three things making in Smith's fa- 
vour may be these : — 

1. He has the kindest of hearts. 

2. He has the clearest of heads. 

3. He is truth and honour impersonate. 



96 Concerning the Estimate of 

Now, if the account stand thus, the balance is 
unquestionably in Smith's favour. And it is so 
with everything else as well as with Smith. When 
you change to a new and better house, it is not all 
gain. It is gain on the whole ; but there may be 
some respects in which the old house was better 
than the new. And when you are getting on in 
life, it is not all going forward. In some respects 
it may be going back. It is an advance, on the 
whole, when the attorney-general becomes chan- 
cellor; yet there were pleasant things about the 
other way too, which the chancellor misses. It is, 
to most men, a gain on the whole to leave a beautiful 
rectory for a bishop's palace ; yet the change has its 
disadvantages too; and some pleasant things are 
lost. When Bishop Poore, who founded Salisbury 
Cathedral in the thirteenth century, left his magni- 
ficent church amid its sweet English scenery, to be 
bishop of the bleak northern diocese of Durham, he 
must have felt he was sacrificing a great deal. Yet 
to be Bishop of Durham in those days was to be a 
Prince of the Church, with a Prince's revenue : and 
so Bishop Poore was on the whole content to go. 
I daresay in the thirteen years he lived at Durham 
before he died, he often wondered whether he had 
not done wrong. 

You will find men who are good classical scholars 
ready to think it extinguishes a man wholly to 
show that he is grossly ignorant of Latin and Greek. 



Hti7nan Beings. 97 

It is to be granted, no doubt, that as a classical 
training is an essential part of a liberal education, 
the lack of it is a symptomatic thing, like a man's 
dropping his h's. He must be a vulgar man who 
talks about his Ouse and his Hoaks. And even so, 
to write about rem, quomodo rem, as an eminent 
divine has done, raises awful suspicions. So it is with 
viacte estate piicr. Still, we may build too much on 
such things. By a careful study of English models a 
man may come to have a certain measure of classical 
taste and sensibility, though he could not construe 
a chance page of yEschylus or Thucydides, or even 
an ode of Horace. Yet you will never prevent 
many scholars from sometimes throwing in such a 
man's face his lack of Latin and Greek ; as though 
that utterly wiped him out. I cannot but confess, 
indeed, that there is no single fact which goes more 
fatally to the question, v/hether a man can claim to 
be a really educated person, than the manifest want 
of scholarship ; all I say is, that too much may be 
made of even this. You know that a false quantity 
in a Latin quotation in a speech in Parliament can 
never be quite got over. It stamps the unfortunate 
individual who makes it. He may have many 
excellent qualities; many things of much more 
substantial worth than the power of writing alcaics 
ever so fluently ; yet the suspicion of the want of 
the education of ,a gentleman will brand him. Yet 
Paley was a great man, though when he went to 

H 



98 Concerning the Estimate of 

Cambridge to take his degree of Doctor of Divinity, 
in the Concio ad Clerum he preached on that occa- 
sion, he ^ronovincQd prof iigtcs, prof ugiis. A shower 
of epigrams followed. Many a man, incomparably 
inferior to Paley on the whole, felt his superiority to 
Paley in the one matter of scholarship. Here was 
a joint in the great man's armour, at which it 
was easy to stick in a pin. Lockhart, too, was a 
very fair scholar ; though you read at Abbotsford, 
above the great dog's grave, certain lines which he 
wrote : — 

Maidae marmorea dermis sub imagine, Maida, 
Ad januam Domini. Sit tibi terra levis ! 

You will find it difficult, if you possess a fair ac- 
quaintance with the literature of your own country, 
to suppress some little feeling of contempt for a 
man whose place in life should be warrant that he is 
an educated man, yet who is blankly ignorant of 
the worthy books in even his own language. Yet 
you may find highly respectable folk in that con- 
dition of ignorance: — medical men in large practice ; 
country attorneys, growing yearly in wealth as their 
clients are growing poorer ; clergymen, very diligent 
as parish priests, and not unversed in theology, if 
versed in little else. I have heard of a highly re- 
spectable divine, of no small standing as a preacher, 
who never had heard of the Spectator (I mean, of 
course, Steele and Addison's Spectator) y at a period 



Human Beings. 99 

very near the close of his Hfe. And certain of his 
neighbours who willingly laughed at that good 
man's ignorance were but one degree ahead of him 
in literary information. They knew the Spectato7% 
but they had never heard of Mr. Ruskin nor of Lord 
Macaulay. Still, they could do the work which it 
was their business to do very reputably. And that 
is the great thing, after all. 

The truth is, that the tendency in a good scholar 
to despise a man devoid of scholarship, and the 
tendency in a well-read man to despise one who 
has read little or nothing besides the newspapers, is 
just a more dignified development of that impulse 
which is in all human beings to think A or B very 
ignorant, if A or B be unacquainted v/ith things 
which the human beings first named know well I 
have heard a gardener say, with no small contempt, 
of a certain eminent scholar — 'Ah, /^^ knows nothing: 
he does not know the difference between an arbutus 
and a juniper.' Possibly you have heard a sailor 
say of some indefinite person — ^ He knows nothing : 
he does not know the fore-top from the binnacle.' 
I have heard an architect say of a certain man, to 
whom he had shown a certain noble church — 
* Why, the fellow did not know the chancel from 
the transept.' And although the architect, being 
an educated man, did not add that the fellow knew 
nothing, that was certainly vaguely suggested by 
what he said. A musician tells you, as something 



loo Concerning the Estimate of 

M^hich finally disposes of a fellow-creature, that he 
does not know the difference between a fugue and 
a madrigal. I remember somewhat despising a 
distinguished classical professor, who read out a 
passage of Milton to be turned into heroic Latin 
verse. One line was, 

Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue : 

which the eminent man made an Alexandrine, by 
pronouncing fugue in two syllables, as FEWGEW. 
In fact, if you find a man decidedly below you in 
any one thing, if it were only in the knowledge how 
to pronounce fugue, you feel a strong impulse to 
despise him on the whole, and to judge that he 
stands below you altogether. 

Probably the most common error in the estimate 
of human beings, is one already named : it is, to 
think meanly of a man if you find him plainly not 
a gentleman. And I have present to my mind 
now, a case which we have all probably witnessed : 
namely, a set of empty-headed puppies, of distin- 
guished aspect and languid address, imperfectly 
able to spell the English language, and incapable 
of anything but the emptiest badinage in the re- 
spect of conversation ; yet expressing their supreme 
contempt for a truly good man, who may have 
shown himself ignorant of the usages of society. 
You remember how Brummell mentioned it as a 
fact quite sufficient to extinguish a man, that he 



Hitman Beings. loi 

was ' a person who would send his plate twice for 
soup.' The judgment entertained by Brummell, 
or by anyone like Brummell, is really not worth a 
moment's consideration. I think of the difficulty 
which good and sensible people feel, in believing 
the existence of sterling merit along with offensive 
ignorance and vulgarity. Yet a man whom no one 
could mistake for a gentleman, may have great 
ability, great eloquence in his own way, great influ- 
ence with the people, great weight even with cul- 
tivated folk. I am not going to indicate localities 
or mention names ; though I very easily could. No 
doubt, it is irritating to meet a member of the 
House of Commons, and to find him a vulgar 
vapourer. Yet, with all that, he may be a ver^^ 
fit man to be in Parliament ; and he may have 
considerable authority there, when he sticks to 
matters he can understand. And if refined and 
scholarly folk think to set such a one aside, by 
mentioning that he cannot read Thucydides, they 
will find themselves mistaken. 

It is, to many, a very bitter pill to swallow ; a 
very disagreeable thing to make up one's mind to ; 
yet a thing to which the logic of facts compels ever}' 
wise man to make up his mind : that in these days 
men whose features, manner, accent, entire ways of 
thinking and speaking, testify to their extreme vul- 
garity, have yet great influence with large masses 
of mankind. And it is quite vain for cultivated folk 



102 Concerning the Estimate of 

to think to ignore such. Men grossly ignorant of 
history, of literature, of the classics : men who 
never brushed their nails : men who don't know 
when to wear a dress coat and when a frock : may 
gain great popularity and standing with a great 
part of the population of Great Britain. Their 
vulgarity may form a high recommendation to the 
people with whom they are popular. It would be 
I easy to point out places where anything like re- 
j finement or cultivation would be a positive hind- 
Crance to a man. Let not blocks be cut with razors. 
Let not coals be carried in gilded chariots. Rougher 
means will be more serviceable. And if people of 
great cultivation say — 'A set of vulgar fellows; 
not worth thinking of;' and refuse to see the work 
such men are doing, a;nd to counteract it where its 
effects are evil : those cultivated people will some 
day regret it. I occasionally see a periodical pub- 
lication, containing the portraits of men who are 
esteemed eminent by a certain class of human 
beings. Most of those men are extremely ugly and 
all of them extremely vulgar-looking. The natural 
impulse is to throw the coarse efifigies aside, and to 
judge that such persons can do but little, either for 
good or ill. But if you enquire, you will find they 
are doing a great work, and wielding a great influ- 
ence with a very large section of the population ; 
the work and influence, being, in my judgment, of 
the most mischievous and perilous character. 



Human Beings. 103 

Then a truth very much to be remembered, is, 
that the fact of a man's doing something conspicu- 
ously and extremely ill, is no proof whatsoever 
that he is a stupid man. To many people it appears 
as if it were such a proof, simply because their ideas 
are so ill-defined. If a clergyman ride on horse- 
back very badly, he had much better not do so in 
the presence of his humbler parishioners. The 
esteem in which they hold his sermons will be 
sensibly diminished, by the recollection of having 
seen him roll ignominiously out of the saddle, and 
into the ditch. Still, in severe logic, it must be 
apparent that if the sermons be good in themselves, 
the bad horsemanship touches them not at all. It 
comes merely to this : that if you take a man off 
his proper ground, he may make a very poor ap- 
pearance ; while on his proper ground, he would 
make a very good one. A swan is extremely 
graceful in the water ; the same animal is extremely 
awkward on land. I have thought of a swan, 
clumsily waddling along on legs that cannot sup- 
port its weight, when I have witnessed a great 
scholar trying to make a speech on a platform, and 
speaking miserably ill. The great scholar had left 
his own element, where he was graceful and at ease ; 
he had come to another, which did not by any 
means suit him. And while he floundered and 
stammered through his wretched little speech, I 
have beheld fluent empty-pates grinning with joy 



1 04 Concerning the Estimate of 

at the badness of his appearance. They had got 
the great scholar to race with them : they in their 
own element, and he out of his. They had got him 
into a duel, giving them the choice of weapons. 
And having beat him (as logicians say), secundum 
quid, they plainly thought they had beat him sim- 
pliciter. You may have been amused at the arti- 
fices by which men, not good at anything but very 
fluent speaking, try to induce people infinitely 
superior to them in every respect save that one, to 
make fools of themselves by miserable attempts at 
that one thing they could not do. The fluent 
speakers thought, in fact, to tempt the swan out of 
the water. The swan, if wise, will decline to come 
(^out of the water. 

I have beheld a famous anatomist carving a goose. 
He did it very ill. And the faith of the assembled 
company in his knowledge of anatomy was mani- 
festly shaken. You may have seen a great and 
solemn philosopher, seeking to make himself agree- 
able to a knot of pretty young girls in a drawing- 
room. The great philosopher failed in his anxious 
endeavours ; while a brainless cornet succeeded to 
perfection. Yet though the cornet eclipsed the 
philosopher in this one respect, it would be unjust 
to say that, on the whole, the cornet was the philo- 
sopher's superior. I have beheld a pious and 
amiable man playing at croquet. He played fright- 
fully ill. He made himself an object of universal 



Htiman Beings. 105 

derision. And he brought all his good qualities into 
, grave suspicion, in the estimation of the gay young 
people with whom he played. Yes, let me recur to 
my great principle : no clergyman should ever hazard 
his general usefulness, by doing anything whatso- 
ever signally ill in the presence of his parishioners. 
If he have not a good horse, and do not ride well, 
let him not ride at all. And if, living in Scotland, 
he be a curler; or living in England, join in the 
sports of his people ; though it be not desirable 
that he should display pre-eminent skill or agility, 
he ought to be a good player ; above the average. 

It is an interesting thing, to see how habitually, 
in this world, excellence in one respect is balanced 
by inferiority in another : how needful it is, if you 
desire to form a fair judgment, to take men for 
better for worse. I have oftentimes beheld the 
ecclesiastics of a certain renowned countr}% assem- 
bled in their great council to legislate on church 
affairs. And — sitting mute on back benches, never 
dreaming of opening their lips — pictures of help- 
lessness and sheepishness — I have beheld the 
best preachers of that renowned country : I am 
not going to mention their names. Meanwhile — 
sitting in prominent places, speaking frequently 
and lengthily, speaking in one or two cases with 
great pith and eloquence — I have beheld other 
preachers, whose power of emptying the pews of 
whatever church they might serve had been esta- 



io6 Concerning the Estimate of 

blished beyond question by repeated trials. Yet, 
by tacit consent, these dreary orators were admitted 
as the church's legislators ; and, in many cases, not 
unjustly. There is a grander church, in a larger 
country, in which the like balance of faculties may 
be perceived to exist. The greater clergymen of 
that church are entitled bishops. Now, by the 
public at large, the bishops are regarded in the 
broad light of the chief men of the church ; that is, 
the greatest and most distinguished men. Next, the 
thing as regards which the general public can best 
judge of a clergyman is his preaching. The general 
public, therefore, regard the best preachers as the 
most eminent clergymen. But the qualities which 
go to make a good bishop are quite different from 
those which go to make a great preacher. Prudence, 
administrative tact, kindliness, wide sympathies, are 
desirable in a bishop. None of these things can be 
brought to the simple test of the goodness of a 
man's sermon. Indeed, the fiery qualities which go 
to make a great preacher, do positively unfit a man 
for being a bishop. From all this comes an un- 
happy antagonism between the general way of 
thinking as to who should be bishops, and the 
way in which the people who select bishops think. 
And the general public is often scandalized by 
hearing that this man and the other, whom they 
never heard of, or whom they know to be a very 
dull preacher, is made a bishop ; while this or that 



Human Beings. 107 

man who charms and edifies them by his admirable 
sermons is passed over. For the tendency is in- 
veterate with ill-cultivated folk, to think that if a 
man be very good at anything, he must be very 
good at everything. And with uneducated folk, 
the disposition is almost ineradicable, to conclude 
that if you are very ignorant on some subject they 
know, you know nothing ; and that if you do very 
ill something as to which they can judge, you can 
do nothing at all well. Pitt said of Lord Nelson, 
that the great admiral was the greatest fool he ever 
knew, when on shore. A less wise man than Pitt, 
judging Nelson a ver}^ great fool on shore, would 
have hurried to the conclusion that Nelson was a 
fool everywhere and altogether. And Nelson 
himself showed his wisdom, when informed of what 
Pitt had said. ' Quite true,' said Nelson ; ' but I 
should soon prove Pitt a fool if I had him on board 
a ship.' It may, indeed, be esteemed as certain 
that Pitt's strong common sense would not have 
failed him, even at sea ; but when he was rolling 
about in deadly sea-sickness, and testifying twenty 
times in an hour his ignorance of nautical affairs, 
it may be esteemed as equally certain that the 
sailors would have regarded him as a fool. 

I have heard vulgar, self-sufficient people in a 
country parish, relate with great delight instances 
of absence of mind and of lack of ordinary sense, on 
the part of a good old clergyman of great theolo- 



io8 Concerning the Estimate of 

gical learning, who was for many years the incum- 
bent of that parish. A thoughtful person would be 
interested in remarking instances in which an able 
and learned man proved himself little better than a 
baby. But it was not for the psychological interest 
that those people related their wretched little bits 
of ill-set gossip. It was for the purpose of con- 
veying, by inuendo, that there was no good about 
that simple old man at all ; that he was, in fact, a 
fool simpliciter. But if you, learned reader, had 
taken that old man on his own ground, you would 
have discovered that he was anything but a fool. 
* What's the use of all your learning,' his vulgar 
and ignorant wife was wont to say to him, ' if you 
don't know how to ride on horseback, and how 
turnips should be sown after wheat .'* ' 

You may remember an interesting instance, in 
the Life of George Stephenson, of two great men 
supplementing each the other's defects. George 
Stephenson was arguing a scientific point with a 
fluent talker who knew very little about the matter : 
but though Stephenson's knowledge of the subject 
was great, and his opinions sound, he was tho- 
roughly reduced to silence. He had no command 
of language or argument : he had a good case, but 
he did not know how to conduct it. But all this 
happened at a country-house, where Sir William 
Follett was likewise staying. FoUett saw that 
Stephenson was right ; and he was impatient of 






Human Bemgs. 109 

the triumph of the fluent talker. Follett, of course, 
had magnificent powers of argument ; but he had 
no knowledge whatever of the matter under dis- 
cussion. But, privately getting hold of Stephenson, 
Follett got Stephenson to coach him up in the facts 
of the case. Next day, the great advocate led the 
conversation once more to the disputed question : 
and now Stephenson's knowledge and Follett's logic 
combined, smashed the fluent talker of yesterday 
to atoms. 

Themistocles, every one knows, could not fiddle ; 
but he could make a little city a big one. Yet the 
people who distinctly saw he could not fiddle were 
many, while those who discerned his competence 
in the other direction were few. So, it is not un- 
likely that many people despised him for his bad 
fiddling, failing to remark that it was not his voca- 
tion to fiddle. Goldsmith wrote The Vicar of 
Wakefield and The Goodnahtred Man ; yet he felt 
indignant at the admiration bestowed by a com- 
pany of his acquaintances upon the agility of a 
monkey ; and, starting up in anger and impatience, 
exclaimed — ' I could do all that myself I have 
heard of a very great logician and divine, who was 
dissatisfied that a trained gymnast should excel 
him in feats of strength, and who insisted on doing 
the gymnast's feats himself; and, strange to say, 
he actually did them. Wise men would not have 
thought the less of him though he had failed ; but 



I lo Concerning the Estimate of 

it is certain that many average people thought the 
more of him because he succeeded. 

There are single acts which may justly be held 
as symptomatic of a man's whole nature; for, though 
done in a short time, they are the manifestation of 
ways of thinking and feeling which have lasted 
through a long time. To have written two or three 
malignant anonymous letters may be regarded as 
branding a man finally. To have only once tried 
to stab a man in the back may justly raise some 
suspicion of a man's candour and honesty ever after. 
You know, my reader, that if A poisons only one 
fellow-creature, the laws of our country esteem that 
single deed as so symptomatic of A's whole charac- 
ter that they found upon it the general conclusion 
that A is not a safe member of society ; and so, 
with all but universal approval, they hang A. Still 
the doing of one or two very malicious and disho- 
nourable actions may not indicate that a man is 
wholly dishonourable and malicious. These may 
be no more than an outburst of the bad w^hich is 
in every man — cleared off thus, as electricity is 
taken out of the atmosphere by a good thunder- 
storm. I am not sure what I ought, in fairness, to 
think of a certain individual, describing himself as 
a clergyman of the Church of England, who has 
formed an unfavourable opinion of the compositions 
of the present writer ; and who, every now and then, 



Human Beings. 1 1 1 

sends me an anonymous letter. It is, indeed, a 
curious question, how a human being can delibe- 
rately sit down and spend a good deal of time in 
writing eight rather close pages of anonymous mat- 
ter of an unfriendly, not to say abusive, character, 
and then send it off to a man who is a total stranger. 
What are we to think of this individual ? Are we 
to think favourably of him as a clergyman and as a 
gentleman ? He has sent me a good many letters ; 
and I shall give you some extracts from the last. 
For the sake of argument, let it be said that my 
name is Jones. I am a clergyman of the Estab- 
lished Church in a certain country. But my cor- 
respondent plainly thinks it a strong point to call 
me a Dissenter, which he does several times in each 
of his letters. Of course, he knows that I am not 
a Dissenter ; but this mode of address seems to 
please him. I give you the passages from his last 
letter verbatim, only substituting Jones for another 
name, of no interest to anybody : — 
Rev. Jones (Dissenting Preacher), 

I have read your Sermons from curiosity. They exhibit 
your invincible conceit, Hke all your other works. Your notion 
as to the resurrection of the old body is utterly exploded., ex- 
cept amongst such divines as Dr. Gumming (who is not emi- 
nent, as you assert), and similar riff-raff. 

There is now-a-days no Sabbath. The Scotch, who talk of 
a '• sabbath,' are fools and ignorant fanatics. I am glad to 
see tha.t you, Jones, were well castigated by a London paper 
for lending your name to a hateful crusade of certain fanatics 
in Edinburgh (including the odious Guthrie), against opening 



1 1 2 Concerning the Estimate of 

the parks to the people on Sunday. I intend to visit Edin- 
burgh or Glasgow some Sunday^ and to walk about, as a 
clergyman^ between the services, with some little ostentation, 
in order to show my contempt of the local custom. Let any 
low Scotch Presbyterian lay hands on me at his peril ! Ah, 
Jones, you evidently dare not say your soul is your own in 
Scotland ! 

Neither Caird nor Gumming are men of first-rate ability. 
Gumming is a mere dunce, not even literate. How can you 
talk of understanding the works of Mr. Maurice ? Of course 
not : you are too low-minded, and narrow-souled ! But do 
not dare to disparage such exalted merit. Say you are a fool, 
and blind, and we may excuse you. 

You are clearly unable to appreciate excellence of any kind. 
Your assertion, that the doctrines of the Church, our Ghurch, 
are Calvinistic, is 2. false one. Calvinism is now confined to 
illiterate tinkers, Dissenters, Puritans, and low Scotch Pres- 
byterians. 

Your constant use of the phrase, ' My friends,' in your ser- 
mons, is bad and affected. We are not your '■ friends :' and 
you care nothing for your hearers, except to gain their applause ! 

I remain. Sir Jones, 

With no ve7y great respect. 

Your obedient servant, 

P. A. 
(P. S.) Poor A. K. H. B. Why not A. S. S. ! 

Now, my reader, how shall we estimate the man 
that wrote this } Can he be a gentleman } Can he 
be a clergyman } I have received from him a good 
many letters of the same kind, which I have de- 
stroyed, or I might have culled from them still more 
remarkable flowers of rhetoric. In a recent letter 
he drew a very unfavourable comparison between 
the present writer and the author of Friends in 



Human Beings. 



Council. In that unfavourable comparison I heartily 
concur ; but it may be satisfactory to Mr. P. A. to 
know that immediately after receiving his letter I 
was conversing with the author of Friends in Conn- 
cil\ and that I read his letter to my revered friend. 
And I do not think Mr. P. A. would have been 
gratified if he had heard the opinion which the 
author of Friends in Coimcil expressed of P. A. 
upon the strength of that one letter. Let us do 
P. A. justice. For a long time he sent his anony- 
mous letters unpaid, and each of them cost me 
twopence. For some time past he has paid his post- 
ages. Now this is an improvement. The next step 
in advance which remains for P. A., is to cease 
wholly from writing anonymous letters. 

Now to conclude : 

There is great difficulty in estimating human 
beings : that is, in placing them (in the racing 
sense) in your own mind. And the difficulty comes 
of this, that you have to take a conjunct view of a 
man's deservings and ill-deservings : the man's 
merit is the resultant of all his quahties, good and 
bad. In a race the comparison is brought to the 
single point of speed ; or, more accurately speak- 
ing, to the test, which horse shall, on a given day, 
pass the winning-post first. Everyone understands 
the issue; and the prize goes on just the one con- 
sideration. Great confusion and difficulty would 

I 



114 Concerning the Estimate of 

arise if other issues were brought in: as for instance, 
if a man were permitted to say to the owner of the 
winner, * You have passed the post first, but then 
my horse has the longest tail; and, upon the 
strength of that fact, I claim the cup.' Yet, in 
placing human beings (mentally) for the race of 
life, the case is just so. You are making up your 
mind — * Is this man eminent or obscure '^. is he de- 
serving or not } — is he good or bad } ' But there is no 
one issue to which you can rightly bring his merits. 
He may exhibit extraordinary skill and ability in 
doing some one thing; but a host of little disturb- 
ing circumstances may come to perplex your judg- 
ment. Mr. Green was a good scholar and a clever 
fellow, yet I have heard Mr. Brown say — ' Green ! 
ah, he 's a beast ! Do you know, he told me he 
always studies without shoes and stockings !' And 
then there is a difficulty in saying what importance 
ought to be attached to those disturbing causes, as 
well as whether they exist or not. One man thinks 
a long tail a great beauty, another attaches no con- 
sequence to a long tail. One man concludes that 
Mr. Green is a beast because he studies without 
shoes or stockings ; another holds that as an in- 
different circumstance, not affecting his estimate of 
Green. I fear we can come to no more satisfactory 
conclusion than this — that of Green, and of each 
human being, there are likely to be just as many 
different estimates as there are people who will 



H^iman Beings. 1 1 5 

take the trouble of forming an estimate of them 
at all. 

You will remark, I have been speaking of esti- 
mates, honestly formed and honestly expressed. 
No doubt we often hear, and often read, estimates of 
men, which estimates have plainly been disturbed 
by other forces. No wise man will attach much 
weight to the estimate of a successful man, which 
is expressed by a not very magnanimous man whom 
he has beaten. If A sends an article to a magazine, 
and has it rejected, he is not a competent judge 
of the merit of the articles which appear in that 
number in which he wished his to be. You would 
not ask for a fair estimate of Miss Y's singing from 
a young lady who tries to sing as well, and fails. 
You would not expect a very reliable estimate of a 
young barrister, getting into great practice, of poor 
Mr. Briefless, mortified at his own ill-success. You 
would not look for a very flattering estimate of Mr. 
Melvill or Bishop Wilberforce from a preacher who 
esteems himself as a great man, but who somehow 
gets only empty pews and bare walls to hear him 
preach. Sometimes, in such estimates, there are real 
envy and malice, as shown by intentional misrepre- 
sentation and mere abuse. More frequently, we 
willingly believe, there is no intention to estimate 
unfairly ; the bias against the man is strong, but it 
is not designed. A writer cut off from the staff of 
a periodical, though really an honest man, has been 



1 16 Estimate of Human Beings. 

known to attack another writer retained on that 
staff. Let me say that, in such a case, a very high- 
minded man would decHne to express pubHcly any 
estimate, being aware that he could not help being 
somewhat biassed. 

Let this be a rule : — 

If we think highly of one who has beaten us, let 
us say out our estimate warmly and heartily. 

If we think ill of one who has beaten us, let us 
keep our estimate to ourselves. It is probably un- 
just. And even if it be a just estimate, few men of 
experience will think it so. 




CHAPTER VI. 
REMEMBRANCE. 




HALL I, because I have seen the subject 
which has been simmering in my mind 
for several past days, treated beautifully 
liy another hand, resolve not to touch that subject, 
and to let my thoughts about it go ? No, I will 
not. 

It was a little disheartening, no doubt, when I 
looked yesterday at a certain Magazine, to find 
what I had designed to say, said far better by 
somebody else. But then Dean Alford said it in 
graceful and touching verse: I aimed no higher 
than at homely prose. 

Sitting, my friend, by the evening fireside : sitting 
in your easy chair, at rest : and looking at the warm 
light on the rosy face of your little boy or girl, 
sitting on the rug by you : do you ever wonder 
what kind of remembrance these little ones will 
have of you, if God spares them to grow old ? 



1 1 8 Reme7nbra7ice. 



Look into the years to come : think of that smooth 
face lined and roughened ; that curly hair gray ; 
that expression, now so bright and happy, grown 
careworn and sad ; and you long in your grave. 
Of course, your son will not have quite forgot you : 
he will sometimes think and speak of his father who 
is gone. What kind of remembrance will he have 
of you } Probably very dim and vague. 

You know for yourself, that when you look at 
your little boy in the light of the fire, who is now a 
good deal bigger than in the days when he first 
was able to put a soft hand in yours and to walk by 
your side, you have but an indistinct remembrance 
of what he used to be then. Knowing how much you 
would come to value the remembrance of those 
days, you have done what you could to perpetuate 
it. As you turn over the leaves of your diary, you 
find recorded with care many of that little man's 
wonderful sayings : though, being well aware that 
these are infinitely more interesting to you than to 
other people, you have sufficient sense to keep them 
to yourself. There are those of your fellow- 
creatures to whom you would just as soon think of 
speaking about these things, as you would think of 
speaking about them to a jackass. And you have 
aided your memory by yearly photographs : thank- 
ful that such invaluable memorials are now possible ; 
and lamenting bitterly that they came so late. Yet, 
with all this help : and though the years are very 



Re7nembrance. 1 1 9 



few ; your remembrance of the first summer that 
your little boy was able to run about on the grass 
in the green light of leaves, and to go with you to 
the stable-yard and look with admiration at the 
horse, and with alarm at the pig, voraciously de- 
vouring its breakfast ; is far less vivid and distinct 
than you would wish it to be. Taught by experi- 
ence, you have striven with the effacing power of 
time : yet assuredly not with entire success. Yes ; 
your little boy of three years old has faded some- 
what from your memory : and you may discern in 
all this the way in which you will gradually fade 
from his. Never forgotten, if you have been the 
parent you ought to be, you will be remembered 
vaguely. And you think to yourself, in the restful 
evening, looking at the rosy face. Now, when he has 
grown old, how will he remember me } I shall have 
been gone, for many a day and year; all my work, 
all my cares and troubles, will be over : all those 
little things will be past and forgot, which went to 
make up my life, and about which nobody quite 
knew but myself. The table at which I write, the 
inkstand, all my little arrangements, will be swept 
aside. That little man will have come a long, long 
way, since he saw me last. How will he think of 
me } Will he sometimes recall my voice, and the 
stories I told, and the races I used to run } Will 
he sometimes say to a stranger, ' That's his picture : 
not very like him ; ' will he sometimes think to 



1 20 Remembrance. 



himself, ' There is the corner where he used to sit : 
I wonder where his chair is now ? ' 

Cowper, writing at the age of fifty-eight, says of 
his mother : ' She died when I had completed my 
sixth year, yet I remember her well. I remember 
too a multitude of maternal tendernesses which I 
received from her, and which have endeared her 
memory to me beyond expression/ For fifty-two 
years the over-sensitive poet had come on his earthly 
pilgrimage, since the little boy of six last saw his 
mother's face. Of course, at that age, he could 
understand very little of what is meant by death ; 
and very little of that great truth, which Gray tells 
us he discovered for himself, and which very few 
people learn till they find it by experience, that in 
this world a human being never can have more than 
one mother. Yet we can think of the poor little 
man, finding daily that no one cared for him now as 
he used to be cared for : finding that the kindest 
face he could remember was now seen no more. 
And doubtless there was a vague, overwhelming 
sorrow at his heart, which lay there unexpressed 
for half a century, till his mother's picture sent him 
by a relative touched the fount of feeling, and 
inspired the words we all know : 

I heard the bell toll'd on thy burial day : 
I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away : 
And turning from my nursery window, drew 
A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu ! 



Re7nembrance. 1 2 1 



But was it such ? — It was. — Where thou art gone, 
Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown. 
May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore, 
The parting word shall pass my lips no more ! 

Nobody likes the idea of being quite forgot. Yet 
sensible people have to make up their mind to it. 
And you do not care so much about being forgotten 
by those beyond your own family circle. But you 
shrink from the thought that your children may 
never sit down alone, and in a kindly way think for 
a little of you after you are dead. And all the little 
details and interests which now make up your 
habitude of life seem so real, that there is a certain 
difficulty in bringing it home to one that they are 
all to go completely out, leaving no trace behind. 
Of course they must. Our little ways, my friend, 
will pass from this earth : and you and I will be 
like the brave men who lived before Agamemnon. 
A clergyman who is doing his duty diligently, does 
not like to think that when he goes, he will be so 
soon forgotten in his old parish and his old church. 
Bigger folk, no doubt, have the same feeling. A 
certain great man has been entirely successful in 
carrying out his purpose ; which was, he said, to 
leave something so written that men should not 
easily let it die. But that which is nearest us, 
touches us most. We sympathise most readily 
with little men. Perhaps you preached yesterday 
in your own church, to a large congregation of 



12 2 Remembrance. 



Christian people. Perhaps they were very silent 
and attentive. Perhaps the music was very beautiful, 
and its heartiness touched your heart. The service 
was soon over : it may have seemed long to some. 
Then the great tide of life that had filled the church 
ebbed away, and left it to its week-day loneliness. 
The like happens each Sunday. And many years 
hence, after you are dead, some old people will say, 
Mr. Smith was minister of this parish for so many 
years. That is all. And looking back for even five 
or ten years, a common Sunday's service is as un- 
distinguished in remembrance as a green leaf on a 
great beech-tree now in June, or as a single flake in 
a thick fall of snow. 

Probably you have seen a picture by Mr. Noel 
Paton, called The Silver Cord Loosed. It is one of 
the most beautiful and touching of the pictures of 
that great painter. I saw it the day before yester- 
day : not for the first or second time. People came 
into the place where it was exhibited, talking and 
laughing : but as they stood before that canvas, a 
hush fell on all. On a couch, there is a female 
figure, lying dead. Death is unmistakeably there, 
but only in its beauty. And beyond, through a 
great window, there is a glorious sunset sky. * Thy 
sun shall no more go down ; neither shall thy moon 
withdraw herself : for the Lord shall be thine ever- 
lasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall 
be ended.' Seated by the bed, there is a mourner, 



Remembrance. 123 



with hidden face, in his first overwhelming grief. 
Looking at that picture in former days, I had 
thought how 'at evening time there shall be light:' 
but looking at it now, with the subject of this essay 
in my mind, I thought how that man, so crushed 
meanwhile, if the first grief do not kill him (and 
the greatest grief rarely kills the man of sound 
physical frame), would get over it : and after some 
years would find it hard to revive the feelings and 
thoughts of this day. People in actual modern life 
are not attired in the picturesque fashion of the 
mourner in Mr. Noel Paton's picture : but it is be- 
cause many can from their own experience tell what 
a human being in like circumstances would be feel- 
ing, that this detail of the picture is so touching. 
And the saddest thing about it is not the present 
grief: it is the fact that the grief will so certainly 
fade and go. And no human power can prevent it. 
* The low beginnings of content ' will force them- 
selves into conscious existence, even in the heart 
that is most unwilling to recognize them. You will 
chide yourself that you are able so soon to get over 
that which you once fancied would darken all your 
after days. And all your efforts will not bring back 
the first sorrow : nor recall the thoughts and the 
atmosphere of that time. When you were a little 
boy, and a little brother pinched your arm so that a 
red mark was left, you hastened downstairs to make 
your complaint to the proper authority. On your 



1 24 Remembrance. 



way down, fast as you went, you perceived that the 
red mark was fading out, and becoming invisible. 
And did you not secretly give the place another 
pinch to keep up the colour till the injury should 
be exhibited ? Well, there are mourners who do 
just the like. I think I can see some traces of that 
in hi Memoriam. In sorrow that the wound is 
healing, you are ready to tear it open afresh. And 
by observing anniversaries : by going to places sur- 
rounded by sad associations : some human beings 
strive to keep up their feeling to the sensitive point 
of former days. But it will not do. The surface, 
often spurred, gets indurated : sensation leaves it. 
And after a while, you might as well think to excite 
sensation in a piece of India rubber by pricking it 
with a pin, as think to waken any real feeling in 
the heart which has indeed met a terrible wound, 
but whose wound is cicatrized. All this is very sad 
to think of. Indeed I confess to thinking it the 
very sorest point about the average human being. 
Great grief may leave us : but it should not leave 
us the men we were. There are people in whose 
faces I always look with wonder ; thinking of what 
they have come through, and of how little trace it 
has left. I have gone into a certain room, where 
everything recalled vividly to me one who was dead. 
Furniture, books, pictures, piano : how plainly they 
brought back the face of o.ne, far away ! But the 
regular inmates of the house had no such feeling : 



Remembrance. 1 2 5 



had it not, at least, in any painful degree. No 
doubt, they had felt it for awhile, and outgrown it : 
whereas, to me it came fresh. And after a time it 
went from me too. 

You know how we linger on the words and looks 
of the dead after they are gone. It is our sorrow- 
ful protest against the power of Time, which we 
know is taking these things from us. We try to 
bring back the features and the tones : and we are 
angry with ourselves that we cannot do so more 
clearly. ' Such a day,' w^e think, ' we saw them 
last : so they looked : and such words they said.' 
We do tJiat about people for whom we did not 
especially care while they lived : a certain conse- 
cration is breathed about them now. But how much 
more as to those who did not need this to endear 
them ! You ought to know the lines of a true and 
beautiful poet, about his little brother who died : — 

And when at last he was borne afar 

From the world's wear}- strife, 
How oft in thought did we again 

Live o'er his little life ! 

His every look, his ever>^ word, — 

His very voice's tone, — 
Came back to us like things whose worth 

Is only prized when gone I 

I wish I could tell Mr. Hedderwick how many 
scores of times I have repeated to myself that most 
touching poem in which these verses stand. But I 
know (for human nature is always the same) that, 



126 Remembrance. 



when the poet grew to middle age and more, those 
tones and looks that came so vividly back in the 
first days of bereavement, would grow indistinct and 
faint. And now, when he sits by the fire at evening, 
or when he goes out for a solitary walk, and tries 
to recall his little brother's face, he will grieve to feel 
that it seems misty and far away. 

I cannot see the features right, 
When on the gloom I strive to paint 
The face I knew ; the hues are faint, 

And mix with hollow masks of night. 

And you will remember how Mr. Hawthorne, 
with his sharp discernment of the subtle phenomena 
of the mind, speaking in the name of one who re- 
called the form and aspect of a beautiful woman 
not seen for years, says something like this : When 
I shut my eyes, I see her yet, but a little wanner 
than when I saw her in fact. 

Yes ; and as time goes on, a great deal wanner. 
I have remarked that even when the outlines remain 
in our remembrance, the colours fade away. 

Thus true is it, that as for the long absent, and 
the long dead, their remembrance fails. Their faces, 
and the tones of their voice, grow dim. And some- 
times we have all thought what a great thing it 
would be to be able at will to bring all these back 
with the vividness of reality. What a great thing 
it would be if we could keep them on with us, clearly 



Remembrance. 127 



and vividly as we had them at the first ! When 
your young sister died, oh how distinctly you could 
hear, for many days, some chance sentence as spoken 
by her gentle voice ! When your little child was 
taken, how plainly you could feel, for awhile, the fat 
little cheek laid against your own, as it was for the 
last time ! But there is no precious possession we 
have which wears out so fast as the remembrance 
of those who are gone. There never was but one 
case where that was not so. Let us remember it 
as we are told of it in the never-failing Record : 
there are not many kindlier words, even there : 

* But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, 
whom the Father will send in My name, He shall 
teach you all things, and bring all things to your 
remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.' 

So you see in that case the dear remembrance 
would never wear out but with life. The Blessed 
Spirit would bring back the words, the tones, the 
looks, of the Blessed Redeemer, as long as those 
lived who had heard and seen Him. He was to do 
other things, still more important ; but you will pro- 
bably feel what a wonderfully kindly and encou- 
raging view it gives us of that Divine Person, to 
think of Him as doing all that. And while we have 
often to grieve that our best feelings and impulses 
die away so fast, think how the Apostles, everywhere, 
through all their after years, would have recalled to 
them when needful, all tilings that the Saviour had 



128 Remembrance. 



said to them ; and how He said those things ; and 
how He looked as He said them. They had not to 
wait for seasons when the old time came over them ; 
when through a rift in the cloud, as it were, they 
discerned for a minute the face they used to know ; 
and heard the voice again, like distant bells borne 
in upon the breeze. No : the look was always on 
St. Peter, that brought him back from his miserable 
wander : and St. John could recall the words of that 
parting discourse so accurately, after fifty years. 

The poet Motherwell begins a little poem with 
this verse: — 

When I beneath the cold red earth am sleeping, 

Life's fever o'er, — 
Will there for me be any bright eye weeping 

That I'm no more ? 
Will there be any heart sad memory keeping 

Of heretofore ? 

Now that is a pretty verse ; but to my taste it 
seems tainted with sentimentalism. No man really 
in earnest could have written these lines. And I 
feel not the slightest respect for the desire to have 
* bright eyes weeping ' for you ; or to have some 
vague indefinite 'heart' remembering you. Mr. 
Augustus Moddle, or any empty-headed lackadai- 
sical lad, writing morbid verses in imitation of Byron, 
could do that kind of thing. The man whose desire 
of remembrance takes the shape of a wish to have 
some pretty girl crying for him (which is the thing 



Remembrance. 1 29 



aimed at in the mention of the'bright eye weeping') 
is on precisely the same level, in regard to taste and 
sense, with the silly conceited blockhead who struts 
about in some place of fashionable resort, and fancies 
alli^he young women are looking at him. Why 
should people with whom you have nothing to do 
weep for you after you are dead, any more than 
look at you or think of you while you are living ? 
But it is a very different feeling, and an infinitely 
more respectable one, that dwells with the man who 
has outgrown silly sentimentalism ; yet who looks 
at those whom he holds dearest ; at those whose 
stay he is, and who make up his great interest in 
life ; at those whom he will remember, and never 
forget, no matter where he may go in God's uni- 
verse : and who thinks, Now, when the impassable 
river runs between, — when I am an old remem- 
brance, unseen for many years, — and when they are 
surrounded by the interests of their after life, and 
daily see many faces but never mine; how will 
they think of me ? Do not forget me, my little 
children whom I loved so much, w^hen I shall go 
from you. I do not Avish you (a wise good man might 
say) to vex yourselves, little things ; I do not wish 
you to be gloomy or sad : but sometimes think of 
your father and mother Avhen they are far away. 
You may be sure that, Avherever they are, they will 
not be forgetting you. 



K 




CHAPTER VII. 
ON THE FOREST HILL: 

WITH SOME THOUGHTS TOUCHING DREAM- 
LIFE. 

HY is it that that purple hill will not get 
out of my mind to-night ? I am sure it is 
not that I cared for it so much when I 
could see it as often as I pleased. I suppose, my 
reader, that you know the painful vividness with 
which distant scenes and times will sometimes come 
back, unbidden and unwished. No one can tell why. 
And now, at 1 1.25 P.M., when I have gone up to my 
room far away from home, and ought to go to bed, 
that hill will not go away. There is no use in try- 
ing. And nothing can be more certain than that if 
I went to bed now, I should toss about in a fever 
till 4 or 5 A.M. Well, as a smart gallop takes the 
nonsense out of an aged horse, which has shown an 
unwonted friskiness, there is something which will 
quiet this present writer's pulse : and it shall be 
tried. Come out, you writing case. Come forth, 



On the Forest-Hill. 



i^i 



the foolscap, the Ink-bottle, the little quill that has 
written many pages. And now you may come 
back again before the mind's eye, purple hill not 
seen for years. 

I shut my eyes, which if opened would behold 
many things not needful to be noted ; and then the 
scene arises. In actual fact, the writer is surrounded 
by the usual furniture of a bedroom in a great rail- 
way hotel in a certain ancient city : and occasional 
thundering sounds, and awful piercing screeches, 
speak of arriving and departing trains somewhat 
too near. I have walked round the city, upon the 
wall. And reaching a certain spot, I sat down in 
the summer twilight, and looked for a long time at 
the old cathedral, which is not grey with age. On 
the contrary, it is red ; as though there lingered 
about its crumbling stones the sunsets of seven 
hundred summers. The day was, as we learn from 
Bishop Blomfield's Life, wherein to be the chief 
minister of that noble church was esteemed as a 
very poor preferment. And this estimation is 
justified by the statement that the annual revenue 
of the bishop was not so very many hundred pounds. 
But who shall calculate the money value of the 
privilege of living in this quaint old city, whose 
streets carry you back for centuries ; and of worship- 
ping, as often as you please, under that sublime 
roof: of breathing the moral atmosphere of the 
ancient place ; and of looking from its walls upon 



132 On the Forest- H ill : • 

those blue hills and over those rich plains ? Surely 
one might here live a peaceful life of worship, 
thought, and study : amid Gothic walls and carved 
oak and church music. And if any ordinary man 
should declare that he could not be content with 
all this, just let me get him by the ears. Wouldn't 
I shake him ! 

But all this is a deviation. And if there is any- 
thing on which the writer prides himself, it is the 
severity of his logic. You will not find in his 
pages those desultory and wandering passages which 
attract the unthinking to the works of Archbishop 
Whately and Mr. John Stuart Mill. And from this 
brief excursion he returns, to the severe order of 
thought which is natural to him. 

I shut my eyes, as has been already remarked. 
The railway hotel, the thundering trains, and the 
yelling engines vanish ; and the old scene arises. It 
is a bright autumn afternoon. The air is very still. 
The sun is very warm, and makes the swept corn- 
fields golden. The trees are crimson and brown ; 
and crisp leaves rustle beneath your foot. It is a 
long valley, with hills on either side ; and a river 
flowing down it. A path winds by the river side, 
through the fields ; and there, in front, is the purple 
hill. An Englishman would think it pretty high. 
It is more than twelve hundred feet in height. The 
upper part of it is covered with heather. It rises 
like a great pyramid, closing in the valley. There 



Thotights touching Drea^n-Life. i 



jj 



are two or three little farm-houses half way up it. 
Above these, it is solitary and still. 

I wonder, this evening, being so far away, yet 
with painful distinctness seeing all that, whether I 
am there in fact as well as feeling t Would some 
country lad, returning late from market, discern a 
shadowy figure walking slowly along the path ; and 
bawl out and run away, recognizing me t 

If you believe various recent books, you will 
understand that when you think very intently of a 
place or person, it is not improbable that some misty 
eidolon of yourself is present to the person or at the 
place. I cannot say that I think this fact well 
authenticated. 

I walk on, not in the summer night, but in the 
autumn afternoon. I want to climb the hill, as I 
have done so often in departed days. So I lay 
aside the pen, and bend down my head on my 
hands. 

I have been there, if ever I was in my life. It is 
not every day one can sit in a very hard easy chair; 
and take such a walk, nearly two hundred miles off. 

Through the long grass, with a dry rustle under 
one's feet, by the river side : up through a little 
wood of firs, till the highway is gained : over a one- 
arched bridge, that spans a little rocky gorge, where 
a stream, smaller than the river, tumbles over a shelf 
of rock, making a noisy waterfall, now white as 



134 ^^ ^^^ Forest- Hill : 

country snow that has lain but a night : up a steep 
and rough road, with birches on either hand, and a 
brook flowing down on one side, that brawls in 
rainy weather, but only murmurs on the still autumn 
day : up and up till the hedges give place to walls 
of rude stones, built without mortar ; and till rough 
slopes of heather spread away on either side : up 
and up till the path ceases, and you sit down on a 
great boulder of granite in the lonely bosom of the 
hill : through all that I have been. A long way 
below this, but a longer way above the wooded 
valley, which you now see in its whole extent, you 
may discern the smoke rising from a farm-house, 
screened a little by a clump of rather scraggy pines. 
There is a sick man there : an aged man whom I 
go to see frequently. I went to the farm-house 
door, a black and white dog barking furiously: 
there a pleasant comely young face welcomed me : 
I went in and found my old friend sitting by his 
warm fireside, which was, indeed, a great deal too 
warm for anyone who had been striving up that 
stiff ascent. I saw his face, and heard his voice : 
though he has been dead for years. I saw the sheep 
feeding on the hill around : I heard a cart passing 
noisily along a road far below: I saw the long 
gleam of the river, down in the valley: and the 
horizon of encircling hills : saw and heard all these 
things as really as though they had been present. 
Memory is certainly a most wonderful thing. It is 



Tho7ights touching Dream- Life. 135 

very capricious. Sometimes it recalls things very 
faintly and dimly : sometimes with a vividness that 
makes one start. Can it be so long ago ! And it 
selects, in a very arbitrary fashion, what it will choose 
to remember. The faces and voices we would most 
desire to recall, it allows to fade away : and scenes 
and people we did not particularly care for, it now 
and then sets before us with this strange vividness 
of force and colour. I did not cherish any special 
regard for the old farmer: and the walk up the 
hill was not a very great favourite. Yet to-night 
something took me by the collar, and walked me 
up that path, and set me down beside the old man's 
chair. 

I have come back. It has exorcised the hill, to 
write all this about it. I had an eerie feeling, like 
that which De Quincey tells he had for many 
nights about the Malay to whom he gave the great 
piece of opium. But now the hill is appeased. All 
these odd, inexplicable states of thought and feeling 
are transitory. And it is much better that they 
should be so. Hard work crowds them out : it is 
only in comparative leisure they come at all. 

But we are not to suppose that only weak and 
fanciful persons know by experience these mental 
phenomena. What may be called Dream-life, that 
is, spending some part of one's time in an imagi- 
nary world ; is a thing in which some of the hardest- 



136 On the Forest-Hill: 

headed of human beings have had their share. And 
this little walk which the writer has had to-night, 
in a place far away, and as upon a day that is left 
far behind, helps him to understand some of those 
singular things which are recorded of the extent to 
which many men have spent their time in castles in 
the air ; and of the persistency with which they have 
dwelt there, to the forgetfulness of more tangible 
interests. If ever there was a man who was not a 
morbid day-dreamer, it was Sir James Mackintosh, 
Sir James Mackintosh was known to mankind in 
general as an acute metaphysician : a forcible po- 
litical writer : a brilliant talker. The greatest place 
he ever held, to the common eye, was that of Re- 
corder of Bombay. And he held that place just 
the shortest time he possibly could to earn his 
pension. How many men knew, looking at the 
homely Scotchman, what his true place in life was t 
Had he not told us himself, we should hardly have 
believed it. He was Emperor of Constantinople ! 
And a laborious and anxious position he found it. 
He (mentally) promoted many of his friends to 
important offices of state : and his friends, by their 
indiscretion and incompetence, caused him an im- 
mense deal of trouble. Then the empire was 
always getting involved in the most vexatious com- 
plications, which seriously affected the Emperor's 
sleep and general health. He always felt like a 
man playing a ^^ry intricate game at chess. No 



Thoughts touching Dream- Life. 137 

' wonder he was sometimes very absent and dis- 
tracted. You would say he might have escaped 
all this by resigning his crown : but he could not 
arrange satisfactorily to do that. A thoughtless 
person smiles at these things : but to Mackintosh 
they were among the most serious things of his life. 
A man of bread-and-butter understanding would 
explain it by saying that Mackintosh was cracjced ; 
but then we all know that he was not cracked. 
Yet, in his disengaged hours, regularly as they 
came, was the thread of his history taken up where 
it had been dropped last time : and he was the 
Emperor, laden with an Emperor's cares. It was 
not as with the actor EUiston, received with great 
applause on the stage at Drury Lane, and fancying 
himself a king just long enough to bestow a blessing 
upon the audience, till he was pulled up by a burst 
of laughter. Nor was it like Alexander the Great, 
according to Dryden, who ' assumed the god ' for 
only a very limited period. Neither was the astute 
philosopher's notion of an Emperor the childish one. 
He was not Emperor, to sit on a throne, and 
receive homage, and make a grand appearance on 
grand occasions : but to go through intricate calcu- 
lations and hard work, and to undergo great anxiety. 
In short. Sir James Mackintosh, being a great 
man, indulged in dream-life on a great scale. But 
commonplace human beings do it in a way that 
suits themselves, and their moderate aspirations. 



138 On the Forest-Hill : 

The poor consumptive girl, who on a dark Decem- 
ber evening is propped up with pillows, and gets 
you to sit beside her while she tells you how much 
stronger and better she feels ; how by spring she 
will be quite well again ; and how delightful the 
long walks will be in the summer evenings, while 
you know she will never see the black-thorn in 
blossom, nor the green leaves on the tree : she is 
doing just what the great metaphysician used to 
do. And the little schoolboy, far away from home, 
a thoughtful, bullied little fellow, does it too, when 
he pictures out the next holiday-time, and his get- 
ting away from all this to be with those who care 
for him. Possibly more people than you would 
think make up for the dulness of their actual life 
in some such way. They take pleasure in fancying 
what they would like, in their vacant hours. And 
unless you wish your mind to become very small 
and dry, you will have such hours. No matter how 
hard-worked you may be, they are attainable. You 
remember what Charles Lamb once wrote to a friend : 
* If you have but five consolatory minutes, between 
the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live 
a century in them.' Human beings, living even the 
most prosaic lives, have sometimes their enchanted 
palace, and live in it a great deal. Have you not 
sometimes, my reader, pictured out the life you 
would like : not in the least expecting it, or even 
really wishing it, any more than Mackintosh really 



Thoughts touching Dreain-Life. 139 

looked to be made Emperor of Constantinople ? 
And when you have set your heart on something 
happening, which is very likely not to happen, it is 
quite right to please yourself by picturing out the 
best: all the more that this is all the enjoyment of 
it you are likely to have. If we have all suffered a 
great deal of pain, through the anticipation of evils 
which never came ; we have all probably enjoyed a 
great deal of pleasure, through the anticipation of 
pleasant things which were never to be. We have 
lived a good deal in castles which were never to be 
built, but in the air. When we tried for something 
we did not get, you remember well how we used, in 
vacant hours, to plan out all the mode of life, even 
to its minute details : enjoying it only the more 
keenly through the intrusion of the fear that only 
in this airy fashion should we ever lead that life 
which we should have enjoyed so much. Of course, 
it is not expedient to waste in dreaming over noble 
plans, the precious hours which might have gone 
far to turn our dreams into serviceable realities. It 
is foolish for the lad at college to spend, in thinking 
how proud his parents would be, and how pleased 
all his friends, if he were to carry off all the ho- 
nours that were to be had, the time which if devo- 
ted to hard work might have gained at least some 
of those soon-forgotten laurels. It may be said 
here, by way of parenthesis, that one of the very 
last visions in which ambitious youth need indulge, 



140 On the Forest-Hill : 

is the vision of being recognized as great and dis- 
tinguished in the place of your birth or your early 
days. A prophet has no honour in his own country. 
I have a friend, greatly revered, who expresses an 
opposite opinion. He maintains, in a charming 
volume, that if you rise to decent eminence in life, 
the people who knew you as a boy will be proud of 
you, and will help to push you on farther. '■ I see, 
with my mind's eye,' says my friend, ' a statue of 
Dunsford erected in ToUerporcorum.' Dunsford 
was a native of ToUerporcorum : and having re- 
corded the conversation of his Friends in Council, 
would probably be thus distinguished. There are 
portions of this earth where the fact is just the con- 
trary. ToUerporcorum is just the last place where 
certain Dunsfords I know are likely to have a sta- 
tue. Dunsford's early acquaintances cannot bear 
the moderate success which has attended Dunsford 
in life : they regard Friends in Council as a very 
poor work ; and a college acquaintance, who never 
forgave Dunsford the medals he won there, now 
and then abuses Dunsford in the ToUerporcorum 
newspaper. I lately visited a certain ToUerporco- 
rum : an ancient town in a fair tract of country. 
That ToUerporcorum had its Dunsford. Dunsford 
started from small beginnings ; but gradually rose 
about as high as a human being well can in a cer- 
tain portion of Scandinavia. But the fashionable 
and intellectual thing, in ToUerporcorum, was to 



Thottghts toticJiing Dream- L ife. 141 

ignore Dunsford and his career altogether. Nobody 
cared about him or it. Dunsford sometimes went 
back to Tollerporcorum ; and the Tollerporcorum 
people diligently shut their eyes to his existence. 
Every envious little wretch who had stuck in the 
mud, thus avenged himself on Dunsford for having 
got on so far. In the latter years of his honoured 
life, Dunsford hardly ever visited Tollerporcorum : 
and when the great man died, it was never proposed 
at Tollerporcorum to erect so much as a drinking- 
fountain to his memor}^ 

Here ends the parenthesis. Take up the broken 
thread of thought. It is right and pleasant to gain 
at least the pleasure of anticipation out of happy 
things that are not to be. And when you see a 
sanguine person in a state of great enjoyment 
through such anticipation, you will not, unless you 
have in you the spirit of my old friend Mr. Snarling, 
try to throw a damp upon all this innocent happi- 
ness by pointing out, with great force of logic, how 
ver>' little chance there is of the anticipation being 
realized. That is only the stronger reason for en- 
joying in this way that which you are not likely to 
enjoy in any other. There is hardly a more touch- 
ing sight, than the sight of a human being, old or 
young, happy in the anticipation of any pleasant 
thing which he w^ill never reach. With what a rosy 
face and what bright eyes your little boy of five 
years old confides to you all he is to do when he is 



142 On the Forest-Hill : 

a man ! Great are the grandeur and fame in which 
he is to live : many are to be his horses and nume- 
rous his dogs ; but a great feature in his plan al- 
ways is, how happy he is to make his father and 
mother. Ah, little man, before those days come, 
your father and mother will be far away. 

And a reason why a wise man, desirous to eco- 
nomize the enjoyment there is in this life, and to 
make it go as far as possible, will often quietly 
luxuriate in the prospect of what he secretly knows 
is not likely to happen, is this certain fact : that in 
this world the thing you would like best, is the 
thing you are least likely to get. That is a fact 
which, as we get on through life, we come to know 
extremely well. Yes : if you set your heart on a 
thing, whoever gets it, yoii won't. You may get 
something else : perhaps something better : but not 
that. If you have such an enthusiasm for Gothic 
architecture, that you sometimes think no one could 
enjoy it so much : if you feel that it would sensibly 
flavour all your life, to live in a Gothic house, or to 
worship in a Gothic church : then, though every- 
thing else about them be all you could wish, rely 
on it, your church and house will be Palladian. 
And you will often meet men whose belongings are 
Gothic : who tell you they are very beautiful, very 
uncomfortable ; that the church is destroying their 
lungs, and the house giving them perpetual cold in 
their heads : and Avho greatly envy you. Of course, 



Thoughts touching Dream-Life. 143 

all this is gratifying, to a certain degree. It serves 
to make you content. 

I have known a man who lived in a house which 
was extremely comfortable, and extremely ugly. 
No one could ever say to what school of architec- 
ture, in particular, his residence was to be referred. 
And the country round was very ugly and bare. 
But, like the farmer in Virgil, in that exquisite pas- 
sage in one of the GeorgicSy regitm ceqiiabat opes 
animo : he could picture out, at will, a charming 
English manor-house, of hospitable-looking red 
brick with stone dressings; oriel-windowed, steep- 
gabled, with great wreathed chimneys,, with envi- 
roning terraces, with magnificent horse-chestnuts 
ever blazing in the glory of June. You thought he 
was walking a bleak moorland road, dreary and 
dismal ; but in truth the warm breeze was shaking 
the blossoms overhead, and making a chequered 
dancing shade on soft green turf below. And there 
yearly comes a certain season, when very many 
human beings practise on themselves a delusion 
something like his. I mean Christmas-time. Who 
ever spent the ideal Christmas } I should like very 
greatly to behold that person. I have never done 
so yet : never spent a Christmas in all my life in 
the ideal way. You ought to be living in a noble 
Gothic house, somewhere in the Midland Counties 
of England. There ought to be a large and gay 
party, spending the holidays there. There ought 



144 ^^ ^^^ Forest-Hill : 

to be an exquisite old church near. There ought 
to be bracing frost, and cheerful snow. All hearts 
should seem touched and warmed by the sacred 
associations of the season. There should be an 
oaken hall, and a vast wood-fire : holly and mistle- 
toe ; and of course roast beef and plum pudding 
and strong ale for every poor person near. You 
should be living, in short, at Bracebrldge Hall, 
exactly as it was when Washington Irving described 
it : and with all the same people. It need not be 
said that in fact, the Christmas time and its sur- 
roundings are quite different from all this. You 
sit down by yourself, and try to get up the feeling 
of the time by reading Washington Irving and Mr. 
Dickens' Christinas Carol. T\\q Ilhistrated Lo7tdon 
News is a great help to ordinary imaginations at 
that season. On the actual Christmas-day, rainy, 
muddy, tooth-aching, ill-tempered, you turn over 
the pictures In that excellent journal ; and you find 
the Ideal Christmas there. My friend Smith once 
told how he spent his first Christriias-day in his 
little country parsonage. Luckily, there was snow. 
He provided that his servants, three in number, 
should have the means of a little enjoyment. He 
worked hard all the forenoon writing a sermon, 
whose subject was not the Nativity. And for an 
hour before dinner he walked, alone, up and down 
a little gravelled walk with evergreens on each side, 
looking at the leaden sky, and the solitary fields ; 



Thottghts touching Dream- Life. 145 

and trying to feel as if he were at Bracebridge Hall. 
He tried with small success. Then, having dined 
in solitude on turkey and plum-pudding, he read 
the pleasant Christmas chapter in Pickwick : and 
tried to get up an enthusiasm about the enjoyment 
which, for the sake of argument, might be conceived 
as existing in many houses that night. Finally, he 
concluded that he was unsuccessfully trying to hum- 
bug himself; and ended by reading Butler s Analogy 
in a good deal of bitterness of heart. 

Very early in our intelligent life, our personality 
begins to cut us off from those nearest to us. Un- 
less a parent have a much deeper insight and sym- 
pathy than most parents have, he loses knowledge, 
very early, of the real inward life of his children. 
At first, it is like wading in shallow water; but it 
is not long till it shelves down into depths beyond 
your diving. The little thoughtful face you see 
every day; the little heart within you know just as 
much as you know the outer side of the moon. No 
doubt, if this be so, it is in a great measure your 
own fault. There are many parents to whom their 
children, young or old, would no more confide the 
things they really care for and think about, than 
they would confide these to the first cabman at the 
next stand. But beyond this, the little things soon 
begin to have a world of their own, not known to 
any but themselves. You may have known young 
children who wearied for the hour when they might 

L 



146 On the Forest-Hill : 

get to bed, and begin to think again : take up the 
history where they left it off last night. Of course, 
the history and the world were very different from 
the fact. Kings and queens, heroes and giants, 
elves and fairies, palaces and castles, these being 
oftentimes enchanted, were common there. Also 
clear views of the kind of life they would live when 
they grew up : a life in which coaches and six, suits 
of armour, and the like, were not unknown. 

It is a mercy for some people, that circumstances 
keep them down. Their lot circumscribes their 
opportunity of making fools of themselves. My 
friend Smith, already named, is a clergyman. His 
church is a plain one. Such is his craze for Gothic 
architecture, that I tremble to think what would 
have become of him if he had chanced to attain 
a magnificent church dating from the eleventh 
century : a church with stately ranks of shafts, 
echoing aisles, storied window, crusaders' statues, 
rich oak carving and monumental brasses, standing 
amid grand old trees. I fear he would have spent 
great part of his time in admiring and enjoying the 
structure : in sitting on a gravestone outside and 
looking at it : in walking up and down inside it : 
and the like. It would have been a great feature 
in his life. It is much safer and better that he has 
been spared that temptation. The grand building, 
of course, has fallen to somebody who does not care 
for it at all. In a former age, there was a barrister 



TJio2igh ts to uchiiig Dream- L ife. 147 

^vho would have keenly enjoyed being made a judge. 
Probably no man ever made a judge would have 
delighted so much in the little accessories of that 
eminent position : the curious garb, and the varied 
dignity whereAvith the administrators of the lavv- are 
surrounded. How tremendously set up he would 
have been if he could once have sentenced a man 
to be hanged ! The writer was present when the 
name of that person was suggested to an individual 
who could have made him Avhat he v^ished to be. 
That individual was asked whether he might not 
do. That individual did not open his lips ; but he 
shook his head slowly from side to side, several 
times. For thus goes on this Avorld. 

Probably most human beings, now and then, have 
short glimpses of cheerfulness and light-heartedness, 
which make them think how much more and better 
might be made of this life. You have seen a 
charming scene, bathed in a glorious sunshine ; and 
you have thought, Now, it might always be like 
this. Sometimes there comes a hopefulness of spi- 
rit in Avhich all difficulties and perplexities vanish : 
in which everything seems delightful, and all crea- 
tures good. This is the potential of happiness in 
man. Of course, it is seldom reached, and never 
for long. ]\Iost people are more familiar Avith the 
converse case, in which everything looks dark and 
amiss : the season of perplexity, despondency, de- 
pression. Probably this comes many times more 



148 On the Forest-Hill : 

frequently than the other. Let me say, my reader, 
that we know the reason why. 

The truth is, it is not needful to our enjoyment 
of many things, that we should fancy any connexion 
between ourselves and them. You read a pleasant 
story, and like it, without fancying yourself its hero 
or heroine. Never in your life, perhaps, have you 
spent a week in a house like Bracebridge Hall : 
and you are never likely to do that. Yet you enjoy 
the sunshiny volume ; and you thank its author for 
many hours of quiet, thoughtful enjoyment, for 
which you felt the better. And indeed, much of 
what is pleasing and beautiful you enjoy most, 
when you never think of it in relation to yourself 
Take the most pleasing development of human 
comeliness : which is doubtless in the case of young 
women. Let it be admitted, that there are few 
things more pleasing and interesting to the rightly- 
constituted mind, than the sight of sweet girlish faces 
and graceful girlish forms, and the tones of the plea- 
sant voices that generally go with them. But there 
is no doubt earthly, that in grave middle age, you 
have much more real pleasure in these things, than 
in feverish youth. Let us suppose, my reader, that 
you are a man in years. Those who were young 
girls in your day, are middle-aged women now : 
they are past. But you look with the kindest 
interest on the fair young faces of another genera- 
tion. A young lad is eager to commend himself to 



Thoughts touching Dream- Life. 149 

the notice and admiration of these agreeable human 
beings. He is filled with bitter enmity at other 
lads, more successful than himself in gaining their 
favour. His whole state of mind, in the circum- 
stances, leads him into a host of absurdities : the 
contemplative mind sees him in the light of an ass. 
Now, you are beyond and above all these things. 
You look with pure pleasure and kindness at the 
fairest beings of God's creation. And you look at 
the fair sight and enjoy it, as you look at Ben 
Lomond or at the setting sun, without the faintest 
wish to make it your own. It is the entire absence 
of personal interest, that makes your interest so 
pleasant, and so unmingled with any disagreeable 
feeling. I remember to have read, in a religious 
biography, a statement made by a very clever and 
good man, about a certain beautiful girl, called 
away in early youth. ' I found myself,' he said, 
' looking at her with an interest for which I could 
not account' Was that unsophisticated simplicity 
real 1 Not able to account for the interest with 
which you look at a pleasant sight ! I think it 
might be accounted for. Though indeed when we 
go to first principles, we get beyond the reach of 
logical explanation. In strictness, you may not be 
able to say why the tear comes to your eye, when 
you look at a number of little children and think 
what is before them. In strictness, you may not be 
able to say why it was that so many people found 



T 50 On the Forest-Hill. 

themselves shedding tears, on a day in Westminster 
Abbey, when they saw the Crown placed on the 
head of a certain young girl, who in after years was 
destined to gain the love of most hearts in Britain 
as the best of Queens. Yet a great many thought- 
ful persons have recorded that they were affected 
alike, in beholding that sight. So there must have 
been something in the sight, to awaken the emotion. 

These are the things of which the writer thought, 
in the circumstances already set out. Probably it 
has made you sleepy to read all this. It had the 
contrary effect to write it : for when the writer at 
length wearily sought his couch, he could not sleep 
at all. 





CHAPTER VIII. 

CONCERNING RESIGNATION 

OU know how a little child of three or four 
years old kicks and howls if it do not get 
its own way. You know how quietly a 
grown-up man takes it, when ordinary things fall out 
otherwise than he wished. A letter, a newspaper^ 
a magazine, does not arrive by the post on the morn- 
ing on which it had been particularly wished for, and 
counted on with certainty. The day proves rainy, 
when a fine day was specially desirable. The 
grown-up man is disappointed ; but he soon gets 
reconciled to the existing state of facts. He did 
not much expect that things would turn out as he 
wished them. Yes : there is nothing like the habit 
of being disappointed, to make a man resigned when 
disappointment comes, and to enable him to take it 
quietly. And a habit of practical resignation grows 
upon most men, as they advance through life. 

You have often seen a poor beggar, most probably 
an old man, with some lingering remains of respect- 



152 Concerning Resignation. 

ability in his faded appearance, half ask an alms 
of a passer-by : and you have seen him, at a word 
of repulse, or even on finding no notice taken of his 
request, meekly turn away : too beaten and sick at 
heart for energy : drilled into a dreary resignation by 
the long custom of finding everything go against him 
in this world. You may have known a poor cripple, 
who sits all day by the side of the pavement of a cer- 
tain street, with a little bundle of tracts in his hand, 
watching those who pass by, in the hope that they 
may give him something. I wonder, indeed, how the 
police suffer him to be there : for though ostensibly 
selling the tracts, he is really begging. Hundreds of 
times in the long day, he must see people approach- 
ing ; and hope that they may spare him a halfpenny; 
and find ninety-nine out of each hundred pass with- 
out noticing him. It must be a hard school of Re- 
signation. Disappointments without number have 
subdued that poor creature into bearing one disap- 
pointment more with scarce an appreciable stir of 
heart. But on the other hand, kings, great nobles, 
and the like, have been known, even to the close of 
life, to violently curse and swear if things went 
against them; going the length of stamping and blas- 
pheming even at rain and wind, and branches of 
trees and plashes of mud, which were of course guilt- 
less of any design of giving offence to these eminent 
individuals. There was a great monarch, who when 
any little cross-accident befell him, was wont to fling 



Co7icerning Resignation. 153 

himself upon the floor ; and there to kick and scream 
and tear his hair. And around him, meanwhile, 
stood his awe-stricken attendants : all doubtless 
ready to assure him that there was something noble 
and graceful in his kicking and screaming : and that 
no human being had ever before with such dignity 
and magnanimity torn his hair. My friend Mr. Smith 
tells me that in his early youth he had a (very slight) 
acquaintance with a great Prince, of elevated rank and 
of vast estates. That great Prince came very early 
to his greatness ; and no one had ever ventured, since 
he could remember, to tell him he had ever said or 
done wrong. Accordingly, the Prince had never 
learned to control himself; nor grown acustomed to 
bear quietly what he did not like. And when any 
one, in conversation, related to him something which 
he disapproved, he used to start from his chair, and 
rush up and down the apartment, furiously flapping 
his hands together, till he had thus blown ofl" the 
steam produced by the irritation of his ner\^ous 
system. That Prince was a good man : and so 
aware was he of his infirmity, that when in these 
fits of passion, he never suffered himself to say a 
single word : being aware that he might say what he 
would aftenvards regret. And though he could not 
wholly restrain himself, the entire wrath he felt 
passed off in flapping. And after flapping for a 
few minutes, he sat down again, a reasonable man 
once more. All honour to him ! For my friend 



154 Concerning Resignation. 

Smith tells me that that Prince was surrounded by 
toadies, who were ready to praise everything he 
might do ; even to his flapping. And in particular, 
there was one humble retainer, who whenever his 
master flapped, was wont to hold up his hands in 
an ecstacy of admiration : exclaiming, ' It is the 
flapping of a god, and not of a man !' 

Now all this lack of Resignation on the part of 
princes and kings comes of the fact, that they are 
so far like children, that they have not become 
accustomed to be resisted ; and to be obliged to 
forego what they would like. Resignation comes 
by the habit of being disappointed ; and of finding 
things go against you. It is, in the case of ordi- 
nary human beings, just what they expect. Of 
course, you remember the adage : ' Blessed is he 
who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disap- 
pointed.' I have a good deal to say about that 
adage. Reasonableness of expectation is a great 
and good thing : despondency is a thing to be dis- 
couraged and put down as far as may be. But 
meanwhile let me say, that the corollary drawn 
from that dismal beatitude seems to me unfounded 
in fact. I should say just the contrary. I should 
say, ' Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he 
will very likely be disappointed.' You know, my 
reader, whether things do not generally happen the 
opposite way from that which you expected. Did 
you ever try to keep off an evil you dreaded, by 



Conceriiing Resignation. 



00 



interposing this buffer ? Did you ever think you 
might perhaps prevent a trouble from coming, by 
constantly anticipating it : keeping meanwhile an 
under-thought that things rarely happened as you 
anticipate them : and thus that \-our anticipation of 
the thing m.ight possibly keep it away ? Of course 
you have : for you are a human being. And in all 
common cases, a watch might as well think to keep 
a skilful watchmaker in ignorance of the way in 
which its movements are produced, as a human 
being think to prevent another human being from 
knowing exactly how he will think and feel in given 
circumstances. We have watched the working of 
our own watches far too closely and long, my 
friends, to have the least difficulty in understand- 
ing the great principles upon which the watches 
of other men go. I cannot look inside your breast, 
my reader, and see the machinery that is working 
there: I mean the machinery- of thought and feeling. 
But I know exactly how it works, nevertheless : for 
I have long Avatched a machinery precisely like it. 
There are a great many people in this world who 
feel that things are all wrong : that they have missed 
stays in life : that they are beaten : and yet who 
don't much mind. They are indurated by long use. 
They do not try to disguise from themselves the 
facts. There are some men who diligently try to 
disguise the facts : and who in some measure suc- 
ceed in doing so. I have known a self-sufficient 



156 Concerning Resignation. 

and disagreeable clergyman who had a church in a 
large city. Five-sixths of the seats in the church 
were quite empty : yet the clergyman often talked 
of what a good congregation he had, with a con- 
fidence which would have deceived any one who 
had not seen it I have known a church where it 
was agony to any one with an ear to listen to the 
noise produced when the people were singing : yet 
the clergyman often talked of what splendid music 
he had. I have known an entirely briefless barrister, 
whose friends gave out that the sole reason why he 
had no briefs was that he did not want any. I have 
known students who did not get the prizes for 
which they competed : but who declared that the 
reason of their failure was, that though they com- 
peted for the prizes, they did not wish to get them. 
I have known a fast young woman, after many 
engagements made and broken, marry as the last 
resort a brainless and penniless blackguard : yet 
all her family talk in big terms of what a delightful 
connexion she was making. Now, where all that 
self-deception is genuine, let us be glad to see it : 
and let us not, like Mr. Snarling, take a spiteful 
pleasure in undeceiving those who are so happy to 
be deceived. In most cases, indeed, such trickery 
deceives nobody. But where it truly deceives those 
who practise it, even if it deceives nobody else, you 
see there is no true Resignation. A man who has 
made a mess of life, has no need to be resigned, if 



Coficernmg Resignation. i^j 

he fancies he has succeeded splendidly. But I look 
with great interest, and often with deep respect, at 
the man or woman who feels that life has been a 
failure : a failure, that is, as regards this world : and 
yet who is quite resigned. Yes : whether it be the 
unsoured old maid, sweet-tempered, sympathetic in 
others' joys, God's kind angel in the house of sorrow: 
or the unappreciated genius, quiet, subdued, pleased 
to meet even one who understands him amid a 
community which does not: or the kind-hearted 
clever man to whom eminent success has come too 
late, when those were gone whom it would have 
made happy : I reverence and love, more than I can 
express, the beautiful natures I have known thus 
subdued and resigned ! 

Yes : human beings get indurated. When you 
come to know well the history of a great many 
people, you will find that it is wonderful what they 
have passed through. Most people have suffered 
a very great deal, since they came into this world. 
Yet, in their appearance, there is no particular trace 
of it all. You would not guess, from looking at 
them, how hard and how various their lot has been, 
I once knew a woman, rather more than middle- 
aged. I knew her well, and sav\^ her almost ever\- 
day for several years, before I learned that the 
homely Scotchwoman had seen distant lands, and 
had passed through ver>' strange ups and downs. 



158 Concerning Resignation. 

before she settled into the quiet orderly life in\vhich 
I knew her. Yet when spoken to kindly, by one 
who expressed surprise that all these trials had left 
so little trace, the inward feeling, commonly sup- 
pressed, burst bitterly out : and she exclaimed, 
' It's a wonder that I'm living at all ! ' And it is a 
wonder that a great many people are living, and 
looking so cheerful and so well as they do : when 
you think what fiery passion, what crushing sorrow, 
what terrible losses, what bitter disappointments, 
what hard and protracted work, they have gone 
through. Doubtless, great good comiCS of it. All 
wisdom, all experience, comes of suffering. I should 
not care much for the counsel of the man whose 
life had been one long sunshiny holiday. There is 
greater depth in the philosophy of Mr. Dickens, 
than a considerable portion of his readers discern. 
You are ready to smile at the singular way in 
which Captain Cuttle commended his friend Jack 
Bunsby as a man of extraordinary wisdom ; whose 
advice on any point was of inestimable value. 
* Here's a man,' said Captain Cuttle, ' who has been 
more beaten about the head than any other living 
man ! ' I hail the words as the recognition of a 
great principle. To Mr. Bunsby, it befell in a literal 
sense: but we have all been (in a moral- sense) a 
good deal beaten about both the head and the 
heart before we grew good for much. Out of the 
travail of his nature : out of the sorrowful history 



Concerning Resignation. 159 

of his past life : the poet or the morahst draws the 
deep thought and feeHng which find so straight a 
w^ay to the hearts of other men. Do you think 
Mr. Tennyson would ever have been the great poet 
he is, if he had not passed through that season of 
great grief which has left its noble record in In 
Memoriam 1 And a youthful preacher, of vivid 
imagination and keen feeling, little fettered by 
anything in the nature of good taste, may by strong 
statements and a fiery manner draw a mob of un- 
thinking hearers : but thoughtful men and women 
w^ill not find anything in all that, that awakens the 
response of their inner nature in its truest depths : 
they must have religious instruction into which real 
experience has been transfused : and the worth of 
the instruction will be in direct proportion to the 
amount of real experience which is embodied in it. 
And after all, it is better to be wise and good, than 
to be gay and happy ; if we must choose between 
the two things : and it is worth while to be severely 
beaten about the head, if tJiat is the condition on 
which alone we can gain true wisdom. True wis- 
dom is cheap at almost any price. But it does not 
follow at all that you will be happy (in the vulgar 
sense) in direct proportion as you are wise. I 
suppose most middle-aged people, when they re- 
ceive the ordinary kind wish at New Year's time of 
a Happy New Year, feel that happy is not quite the 
word : and feel that, too, though well aware that 



i6o Concerning Resignation. 

they have abundant reason for gratitude to a kind 
Providence. It is not here that we shall ever be 
happy : that is, completely and perfectly happy. 
Something will always be coming to worry and 
distress. And a hundred sad possibilities hang 
over us: some of them only too certainly and 
quickly drawing near. Yet people are content, in 
a kind of way. They have learnt the great lesson 
of Resignation. 

There are many worthy people who would be 
quite fevered and flurried by good fortune, if it 
were to come to any very great degree. It would 
injure theii; heart. As for bad fortune, they can 
stand it nicely. They have been accustomed to it 
so long. I have known a very hard-wrought man, 
who had passed, rather early in life, through very 
heavy and protracted trials. I have heard him say 
that if any malicious enemy wished to kill him, the 
course would be to make sure that tidings of some 
signal piece of prosperity should arrive by post on 
each of six or seven successive days. It would 
quite unhinge and unsettle him, he said. His heart 
would go : his nervous system would break down. 
People to whom pieces of good luck come rare and 
small, have a great curiosity to know how a man 
feels when he is suddenly told that he has drawn 
one of the greatest prizes in the lottery of life. The 
kind of feeling, of course, will depend entirely on 



Concernmg Resignation. 1 6 1 

the kind of man. Yet very great prizes, in the 
way of dignity and duty, do for the most part 
fall to men who in some measure deserve them : 
or who at least are not conspicuously undeserving 
of them and unfit for them. So that it is almost 
impossible that the great news should elicit merely 
some unworthy explosion of gratified self-conceit. 
The feeling would in almost every case be deeper, 
and worthier. One would like to be sitting at 
breakfast with a truly good man, when the letter 
from the Prime Minister comes in, ofi*ering him 
the Archbishopric of Canterbury. One would like 
to see how he would take it. Quietly, I have no 
doubt. Long preparation has fitted the man who 
reaches that position for taking it quietly. A recent 
Chancellor publicly stated how he felt when offered 
the Great Seal. His first feeling, that good man 
said, was of gratification that he had fairly reached 
the highest reward of the profession to which he 
had given his life : but the feeling which speedily 
supplanted that, was an overwhelming sense of his 
responsibility and a grave doubt as to his qualifi- 
cations. I have always believed, and sometimes 
said, that good-fortune ; not so great or so sudden 
as to injure one's nerves or heart : but kindly and 
equable ; has a most wholesome effect upon human 
-character. I believe that the happier a man is, the 
better and kinder he will be. The greater part of 
unamiability, ill-temper, impatience, bitterness, and 

M 



T 6 2 Concerning Resignation. 

uncharitableness, comes out of unhappiness. It is 
because a man is so miserable, that he is such a 
sour, suspicious, fractious, petted creature. I was 
amused, this morning, to read in the newspaper an 
account of a very small incident which befell the 
new Primate of England on his journey back to 
London after being enthroned at Canterbury. The 
reporter of that small incident takes occasion to 
record that the Archbishop had quite charmed his 
travelling companions in the railway carriage by 
the geniality and kindliness of his manner. I have 
no doubt he did. I am sure he is a truly good 
Christian man. But think what a splendid train- 
ing for producing geniality and kindliness he has 
been going through for a great number of years. 
Think of the moral influences which have been 
bearing on him for the last few weeks. We should 
all be kindly and genial if we had the same chance 
of being so. But if Dr. Longley had a living of a 
hundred pounds a year : a fretful ailing wife : a 
number of half-fed and half-educated little chil- 
dren : a dirty miserable house : a bleak country 
round : and a set of wrongheaded and insolent pa- 
rishioners to keep straight : I venture to say he 
would have looked, and been, a very different man, 
in that railway carriage running up to London. In- 
stead of the genial smiles that delighted his fellow- 
travellers (according to the newspaper story), his 
face would have been sour and his speech would 



Concerning Resignation. i6 



have been snappish : he would have leant back in 
the corner of a second-class carriage, sadly calcu- 
lating the cost of his journey; and how part of it 
might be saved by going without any dinner. Oh, 
if I found a four-leaved shamrock, I would under- 
take to make a mighty deal of certain people I 
know ! I would put an end to their weary sche- 
mings to make the ends meet. I would cut off all 
those wretched cares which jar miserably on the 
shaken nerves. I know the burst of thankfulness 
and joy that would come, if some dismal load, 
never to be cast off, were taken away. And I 
would take it off. I would clear up the horrible 
muddle. I would make them happy : and in doing 
that, I know that I should make them good ! 

But I have sought the four-leaved shamrock for 
a long time, and never have found it : and so I am 
growing subdued to the conviction that I never will. 
Let us go back to the matter of Resignation ; and 
think a little longer about that. 

Resignation, in any human being, means that 
things are not as you would wish ; and yet that you 
are content. Who has all he wishes t There are 
many houses in this world in which Resignation is 
the best thing that can be felt, any more. The bitter 
blow has fallen : the break has been made : the 
empty chair is left (perhaps a very little chair) : and 
never more, while Time goes on, can things be as 
they were fondly wished and hoped. Resignation 



164 Concerning Resignation. 

would need to be cultivated by human beings : 
for, all round us, there is a multitude of things very 
different from what we would wish. Not in your 
house, not in your family, not in your street, not in 
your parish, not in your country, and least of all in 
yourself; can you have things as you would wish. 
And you have your choice of two alternatives. You 
must either fret yourself into a nervous fever; or 
you must cultivate the habit of Resignation. And 
very often. Resignation does not mean that you are 
at all reconciled to a thing ; but just that you feel 
you can do nothing to mend it. Some friend, to 
whom you are really attached, and whom you often 
see, vexes and worries you by some silly and dis- 
agreeable habit : some habit which it is impossible 
you should ever like, or ever even overlook : yet you 
try to make up your mind to it : because it cannot 
be helped ; and you would rather submit to it than 
lose your friend. You hate the East wind : it withers 
and pinches you, in body and soul : yet you cannot 
live in a certain beautiful city without feeling the 
East wind many days in the year. And that city's 
advantages and attractions are so many and great, 
that no sane man, with sound lungs, would aban- 
don the city merely to escape the East wind. Yet 
though resigned to the East wind, you are anything 
but reconciled to it. 

Resignation is not always a good thing. Some- 
times it is a very bad thing. You should never be 



Concerning Resignation. 165 

resigned to things continuing wrong, when you may 
rise and set them right. I daresay, in the Romish 
Church, there were good men before Luther, who 
were keenly aHve to the errors and evils that had 
crept into it : but who, in despair of making things 
better, tried sadly to fix their thoughts upon other 
subjects : who took to illuminating missals, or con- 
structing systems of logic, or cultivating vegetables 
in the garden of the monastery, or improving the 
music in the chapel : quietly resigned to evils they 
judged irremediable. Great reformers have not been 
resigned men. Luther was not resigned : Howard 
was not resigned : Fowell Buxton was not resigned : 
George Stephenson was not resigned. And there 
is hardly a nobler sight, than that of a man who 
determines that he will NOT make up his mind to 
the continuance of some great evil : who determines 
that he will give his life to battling with that evil 
to the last : who determines that either that evil 
shall extinguish him, or he shall extinguish it ! I 
reverence the strong, sanguine mind, that resolves 
to work a revolution to better things ; and that is 
not afraid to hope it can work a revolution ! And 
perhaps, my reader, we should both reverence it all 
the more that we find in ourselves very little like it. 
It is a curious thing, and a sad thing, to remark in 
how many people there is too much resignation. It 
kills out energy. It is a weak, fretful, unhappy 
thing. People are reconciled, in a sad sort of way, 



1 66 Concerning Resignatio7i. 

to the fashion In which things go on. You have 
seen a poor, slatternly mother, in a wayside cottage, 
who has observed her little children playing in the 
road before it, in the way of passing carriages ; 
angrily ordering the little things to come away from 
their dangerous and dirty play: yet when the chil- 
dren disobey her, and remain where they were, just 
saying no more ; making no farther effort You have 
known a master tell his man-servant to do something 
about stable or garden : yet when the servant does 
not do it, taking no notice : seeing that he has been 
disobeyed, yet wearily resigned : feeling that there 
is no use in always fighting. And I do not speak 
of the not unfrequent cases in which the master, 
after giving his orders, comes to discover that it is 
best they should not be carried out, and is very glad 
to see them disregarded : I mean when he is dis- 
satisfied that what he has directed is not done, and 
wishes that it were done, and feels worried by the 
whole affair: yet is so devoid of energy as to rest 
in a fretful resignation. Sometimes there is a sort 
of sense as if one had discharged his conscience by 
making a weak effort in the direction of doing a 
thing : an effort which had not the slightest chance 
of being successful. When I was a little boy, many 
years since, I used to think this : and I was led to 
thinking it by remarking a singular characteristic 
in the conduct of a school companion. In those 
days, if you were chasing some other boy who had 



Concerning Resignation. 167 

injured or offended you, with the design of retaHa- 
tion; if you found you could not catch him, by 
reason of his superior speed ; you would have re- 
course to the following expedient. If your com- 
panion was within a little space of you, though a 
space you felt you could not make less : you would 
suddenly stick out one of your feet, which would 
hook round his : and he stumbling over it, would 
fall. I trust I am not suggesting a mischievous and 
dangerous trick to any boy of the present genera- 
tion. Indeed, I have the firmest belief that existing 
boys know all we used to know, and possibly more. 
All this is by way of rendering intelligible what 
I have to say of my old companion. He was not a 
good runner. " And when another boy gave him a 
sudden flick with a knotted handkerchief, or the 
like ; he had little chance of catching that other boy. 
Yet, I have often seen him, when chasing another, 
before finally abandoning the pursuit, stick out his 
foot in the regular way, though the boy he was 
chasing was yards beyond his reach. Often did the 
present writer meditate on that phenomenon, in the 
days of his boyhood. It appeared curious that it 
should afford some comfort to the evaded pursuer, 
to make an offer at upsetting the escaping youth, — 
an offer which could not possibly be successful. But 
very often, in after life, have I beheld in the conduct 
of groAvn-up men and women, the moral likeness of 
that futile sticking out of the foot. I have beheld 



1 68 Concerning Resignation. 

human beings who Hved in houses always untidy 
and disorderly : or whose affairs were in a horrible 
confusion and entanglement : who now and then 
seemed roused to a feeling that this would not 
do : who querulously bemoaned their miserable lot ; 
and made some faint and futile attempt to set things 
right : attempts which never had a chance to succeed, 
and which ended in nothing. Yet it seemed some- 
how to pacify the querulous heart. I have known 
a clergyman in a parish with a bad population, seem 
suddenly to waken up to a conviction that he must 
do something to mend matters : and set agoing 
some weak little machinery, which could produce 
no appreciable result, and which came to a stop in 
a few weeks. Yet that faint offer appeared to dis- 
charge the claims of conscience : and after it the 
clergyman remained long time in a comatose state 
of unhealthy Resignation. But it is a miserable 
and a wrong kind of Resignation which dwells in 
that man, who sinks down, beaten and hopeless, in 
the presence of a recognised evil. Such a man may 
be, in a sense, resigned : but he cannot possibly be 
content. 

If you should ever, when you have reached middle 
age, turn over the diary or the letters you wrote in 
the hopeful though foolish days when you were 
eighteen or twenty, you will be aware how quietly 
and gradually the lesson of Resignation has been 
taught you. You would have got into a terrible 



Concerning Resignation. 169 

state of excitement if any one had told you then 
that you would have to forego your most cherished 
hopes and wishes of that time : and it would have 
tried you even more severely to be assured that, in 
not many years, you would not care a single straw 
for the things and the persons who were then up- 
permost in your mind and heart. What an entirely 
new set of friends and interests is that which now 
surrounds you : and how completely the old ones 
are gone ! Gone, like the sunsets you remember in 
the summers of your childhood : gone, like the prim- 
roses that grew in the woods where you wandered 
as a boy. Said my friend Smith to me, a few days 
ago : ^ You remember Emily Jones, and all about 
that ? I met her yesterday, ^vfter ten years. She is 
a fat, middle-aged, ordinary-looking woman. What 
a terrific fool I was ! ' Smith spoke to me in the 
confidence of friendship : yet I think he was a little 
mortified at the heartiness with which I agreed with 
him on the subject of his former folly. He had got 
over it completely : and in seeing that he was (at 
a certain period) a fool, he had come to discern 
that of which his friends had always been aware. 
Of course, early interests do not always die out. 
You remember Dr. Chalmers : and the ridiculous 
exhibition about the wretched little likeness of an 
early sweetheart, not seen for forty years, and long 
since in her grave. You remember the singular way 
in which he signified his remembrance of her, in his 



1 70 Concerning Resignatio7i. 

famous and honoured age. I don't mean the crying : 
nor the walking up and down the garden walk 
calling her by fine names. I mean the taking out his 
card : not his carte ; you could understand that : but 
his visiting-card bearing his name ; and sticking it 
behind the portrait with two wafers. Probably it 
pleased him to do so : and assuredly it did harm to 
no one else. And we have all heard of the like 
things. Early affections are sometimes, doubtless, 
cherished in the memory of the old. But still, more 
material interests come in : and the old affection 
is crowded out of its old place in the heart. And 
so, those comparatively fanciful disappointments sit 
lightly. The romance is gone. The mid-day sun 
beats down : and there lies the dusty way. When 
the resolute and judicious mother of Christopher 
North stopped his marriage with a person she 
deemed unsuitable, we are told that the future pro- 
fessor nearly went mad ; and that he never quite 
got over it. But really, judging from his writings 
and his biography, he bore up under it, after a little, 
wonderfully well. 

But looking back to the days which the old yellow 
letters bring back, you will think to yourself. Where 
are the hopes and anticipations of that time } You 
expected to be a great man, no doubt. Well, you 
know you are not. You are a small man : and never 
will be anything else : yet you are quite resigned. 
If there be an argument which stirs me to indigna- 



Concernmg Resignation. 1 7 1 

tion at its futility ; and to wonder that any mortal 
fever regarded it as of the slightest force : it is that 
which is set out in the famous soliloquy in Cato, as 
to the Immortality of the Soul, Will any sane man 
say, that if in this world you wish for a thing very 
much, and anticipate it very clearly and confidently, 
you are therefore sure to get it ? If that were so, 
many a little schoolboy would end by driving his 
carriage and four, who ends by driving no carriage 
at all. I have heard of a man whose private papers 
were found after his death all written over with his 
signature as he expected it would be when he be- 
came Lord Chancellor. Let us say his peerage was 
to be as Lord Smith. There it was. Smith, C, 
Smith, C, written in every conceivable fashion : so 
that the signature, when needed, might be easy and 
imposing. That man had very vividly anticipated 
the woolsack, the gold robe, and all the rest. It 
need hardly be said he attained none of these. The 
famous argument, you know of course, is that man 
has a great longing to be immortal ; and that there- 
fore he is sure to be immortal. Rubbish ! It is 
not true that any longing after immortality exists 
in the heart of a hundredth portion of the race. 
And if it were true, it would prove immortality no 
more, than the manifold signatures of Smith, C, 
proved that Smith was indeed to be Chancellor. No : 
we cling to the doctrine of a Future Life : we could 
not live without it : but we beHeve it, not because 



172 Concerning Resignation. 

of undefined longings within ourselves, not because 
of reviving plants and flowers, not because of the 
chrysalis and the butterfly : but because ' our Sa- 
viour Jesus Christ hath abolished death, and brought 
light and immortality to light through the gospel.* 
There is something very curious, and very touching, 
in thinking how clear and distinct, and how often 
recurring, were our early anticipations of things that 
were never to be. In this world, the fact is for the 
most part the opposite of what It should be to give 
force to Plato's (or Cato's) argument : the thing you 
vividly anticipate is the thing that Is least likely to 
come. The thing you don't much care for : the 
thing you don't expect : is the likeliest. And even 
if the event prove what you anticipated ; the cir- 
cumstances, and the feeling of It, will be quite dif- 
ferent from what you anticipated. A certain little 
girl three years old was told that in a little while 
she was to go with her parents to a certain city, a 
hundred miles ofl": a city which may be called Al- 
tenburg as well as anything else. It was a great 
delight to her to anticipate that journey, and to 
anticipate it very circumstantially. It was a delight 
to her to sit down at evening on her father's knee : 
and to tell him all about how it would be in going 
to Altenburg. It was always the same thing. Al- 
ways, first, how sandwiches would be made : how 
they would all get into the carriage (which would 
come round to the door), and drive away to a certain 



Concerning Resignatioft. 173 

railway station f how they would get their tickets ; 
and the train would come up ; and they would all 
get into a carriage together, and lean back in cor- 
ners, and eat the sandwiches, and look out of the 
windows : and so on. But when the journey was 
actually made, every single circumstance in the 
little girl's anticipations proved wrong. Of course, 
they were not intentionally made wrong. Her 
parents would have carried out to the letter, if they 
could, what the little thing had so clearly pictured 
and so often repeated. But it proved to be needful 
to go by an entirely different way and in an entirely 
different fashion. All those little details, dwelt on 
so much, and w^th so much interest, were things 
never to be. It is even so with the anticipations 
of larger and older children. How distinctly, how 
fully, my friend, we have pictured out to our minds 
a mode of life, a home and the country round it, 
and the multitude of little things which make up 
the habitude of being : which we long since resigned 
ourselves to knowing could never prove realities ! 
No doubt, it is all right and well. Even St. Paul, 
with all his gift of prophecy, was not allowed to 
foresee what was to happen to himself. You know 
how he wrote that he would do a certain thing, 'as 
soon as I shall see how it will go with me ! ' 

But our times are in the Best Hand. And the 
one thing about our lot, my reader, that we may 



1 74 Concerning Resignation. 

think of with perfect contentment, is that they are 
so. I know nothing more admirable in spirit, and 
few things more charmingly expressed, than that 
little poem by Miss Waring which sets out that 
comfortable thought You know it, of course. 
You should have it in your memory ; and let it be 
one of the first things your children learn by heart. 
It may well come (if you live in Scotland) next 
after O God of Bethel : it breathes the self-same 
tone. And let me close these thoughts with one of 
its verses : 

Thefe are briars besetting every path, 

Which call for patient care : 
There is a cross in every lot, 

And an earnest need for prayer : 
But a lowly heart that leans on Thee, 

Is happy anywhere ! 



CHAPTER IX, 

A REMINISCENCE OF THE OLD TIME : 
BEING SOME THOUGHTS ON GOING AWAY. 




OU know, I am sure, how as we advance 
in life, hours come in which we feel an 
impulse to sit down for a little, and try 
to revive an old feeling, before it dies away. And 
many of our old feelings are dying away ; and will 
ultimately die out altogether. It is partly through 
use ; and partly because our system, physical and 
psychical, is growing less sensitive as we go on. 
We do not feel things now as we used to do. We 
are getting stronger : the robuster nerves of middle 
age do not receive the vivid impressions of earlier 
years ; and there are faintly-flavoured things which 
they cease to appreciate at all. We have come out 
from the green fields, and from the shady wood- 
lands : and we are plodding along the beaten high- 
way of life. It is the noon now; not perhaps 
without some tendency to decline towards evening : 



176 A Reminiscence of 

and we look back to the dawn and to the mornings 
when the air was cool and fresh, and when the sky 
was clear. And we have grown hardened to the 
rougher work of the present time. We have all got 
lines, pretty deeply drawn, upon our faces : and a 
good many grey hairs. And if one could see a 
middle-aged soul, no doubt you would see about it 
something analogous to being wrinkled and grey. 
No doubt you would likewise discern something 
analogous to the thickening and toughening of the 
skin in the case of the middle-aged hand. Neither 
hand nor heart feels so keenly. 

There is no help for it ; but still one cannot 
help regretting it, the way in which things lose 
their first fresh relish by use. We ought to be 
getting more enjoyment out of things than we do. 
A host of very small matters, which we pass without 
ever noticing, would afford us real and sensible 
pleasure if we had not grown so accustomed to 
them. Prince Lee Boo, as we used to read, was 
moved to ecstatic wonder and delight by the 
upright walls and the flat ceiling of an ordinary 
room. They were new to him. There was a young 
Indian chief, many years ago, who came from the 
Far West to London, and was for a season a lion in 
fashionable society. He was a manly, clever young 
fellow : but in his English months he never got 
over his unsophisticated enjoyment of the furniture 
of English houses. And thoughtless folk despised 



The Old Time. 177 



him, when they ought rather to have envied him, as 
they witnessed his dehght in the contemplation of a 
dinner-table where he had been accustomed to see 
a stretched bull's hide : and of plates, knives and 
forks, carpets, mirrors, window-curtains, and wash- 
hand stands. All these great luxuries, and a 
thousand more, he appreciated at their true value : 
while civilized men and women, through familiarity, 
had arrived at contempt of them. Which was right, 
the civilized folk or the savage man } Is it the 
human being who sees least in the things around 
him that ought to be proud : or is not the man 
rather to be envied who discerns in simple matters 
qualities and excellences which others do not 
discern t If you had so worn out your eyes by 
constant use, that you could no longer see, that 
would be nothing to plume yourself on ; you would 
have no right to think you had attained a position 
of superiority to the remainder of the human race, 
in whom the optic nerve still retained its sensitive- 
ness. Yet there are people who are quite proud 
that their mind has had its nerves of sensation 
partially paralyzed ; and who would like you to 
think that those nerves are entirely paralyzed. 
* I don't remark these things,' they will say with 
an air of disdain, when you point out to them 
some of the little material advantages which we 
enjoy in this country now-a-days. They convey 
that they think you must be a weak-minded person 

N 



178 A Reminiscence of 

because you do remark these things : because you 
still feel it a curious thing to leave London in 
the morning, and after ten hours and a half of 
unfatiguing travelling to reach Edinburgh in the 
evening : or because you still are conscious of a 
simple-minded wonder when you send a message 
five hundred miles and get your answer back in a 
quarter of an hour. If there be a mortal whom I 
despise, it is the man who is anxious to impress you 
with the fact that he does not care in the least for 
anything. The human being who is proud because 
he has reached the nil admirari stage, is just a 
human being who is proud because a creeping par- 
alysis has numbed his soul. 

Yet without giving in to it, and without being proud 
of it, you are aware that the keen relish goes from 
that which you grow accustomed to. I have indeed 
heard it said concerning certain individuals whose 
supercilious and lofty air testified that some sudden 
rise in life had turned their head, that they lived in 
a state of constant surprise at finding themselves so 
respectable. But this statement was not true in its 
full extent. For after being for several years in a 
position for which nature never intended him, even 
Dr. Bumptious (before his elevation his name was 
Toady) must have grown to a certain measure 
accustomed to it. Even other people got accus- 
tomed to it. And though his incompetence for his 
place remained just as glaring as ever, they ceased 



The Old Time. 179 



to remark it ; and came to accept it as something 
in the nature of things. You know, we do not per- 
plex ourselves by inquiring every morning why 
there are such creatures as wasps, toads, and rattle- 
snakes. But if these beings were of a sudden intro- 
duced into this world for the first time, it would be 
different. 

It is to be lamented, that the very fresh and sen- 
sible enjoyment which we derive from very little 
things when they are new to us, passes so completely 
away when they grow familiar. I remark that my 
fellow-creatures, who inhabit houses in this street, 
are very far from being duly thankful for the great 
privilege we possess, in having a post-office at the 
end of it. You write your letters in the forenoon 
after you have completed your more serious work ; 
and upon each envelope you stick the representation 
of a face which is very familiar to us all, and very 
dear. If you are a wise man, you post your letters 
for yourself : and accordingly the first thing you do 
daily, when you go forth to your out-door business 
or duty, is to proceed to that little opening which 
receives the expression of so much care, so much 
kindness, so much worry, so much joy and sorrow, 
and to drop the documents in. Not many of the 
human beings who post letters and who receive them 
have any habitual sense of the supreme luxury 
they enjoy in that, familiar institution of the post- 
office. Into that little opening goes your letter : a 



1 8o A Reminiscence of 

penny secures its admission, and obtains for it very 
distinguished consideration : and in a little while 
the most ingenious mechanism that has been de- 
vised by the most ingenious minds is hard at work 
conveying your letter, at tremendous speed, by land 
or sea : till next morning, unerring as the eagle 
upon its eyrie, it swoops down upon the precise 
dwelling at which you aimed it. When I say it 
swoops down upon a dwelling in the country, I 
mean to express poetically the fact that it comes 
jogging along in a cart drawn by a little white pony, 
which stops for the purposes of conversation when- 
ever it meets anybody in the wooded lane I have 
in my mind. But in saying that the inhabitants of 
this street are not duly thankful for the post-office 
at the corner, I did not mean merely that they fail 
to understand what a blessing to Britain the system 
of postal communication is. Everybody, on ordi- 
nary days, fails to understand that. I was thinking 
of something else. I was thinking of the luxury 
of having a receiving-house so near. When I lived 
in the country, the post-office was five miles distant : 
and if you missed the chance of sending away your 
letters in the morning by the cart drawn by the 
white pony, you must wait till next day ; or you 
must send a special messenger to the old-fashioned 
town of red freestone dwellings, standing by a clas- 
sic river's side. Let not that town be mentioned 
save in complimentary terms. Let me learn by the 



The Old Time. i8i 

misfortune of another. An eminent native of the 
district which surrounds it, known in the world of 
letters, once upon a time pubHshed some remarks 
upon that town, disguising its pretty name in ano- 
ther of somewhat ludicrous sound. And when that 
eminent man shortly afterwards strove to persuade 
the inhabitants to send him to represent them in 
Parliament, the old offence was raked up, and it 
did him harm. This, however, is a digression. Let 
us return. When I came from the country, to live 
in this city, I felt it a great privilege, and something 
to be enjoyed freshly every time, to take my letters 
to the post-office two hundred yards off. It was 
delightful. Not once in the day, but (if need were) 
half a dozen times, could you write your letter, and 
in three minutes have it in the post-office. There was 
something very fresh and enjoyable in the reflection, 
as you stood by the receiving-house window, Now 
here in these minutes I am in the same position in 
which half an hour's smart driving, or an hour and 
a quarter's steady walking, would have placed one 
in departed days ! Wonderful ! But now, after 
several years of the enjoyment of this privilege, 
the fresh wonder has worn away. The edge of 
enjoyment is dulled. And though I try hard, in 
going to the post-office, to feel what a blessing it 
is, I cannot feel it as I would wish. Yes, the enjoy- 
ment of the post-office is gone in great measure : 
even as the unutterable greenness discerned by the 



i82 A Reminiscence of 

stranger goes from the summer trees among which 
you have come to feel yourself at home : even as 
the sound of Niagara becomes inaudible to the 
waiters at the Niagara Hotel : even as the Bishop 
who was plucked at college gradually ceases to be 
astonished at finding himself a Bishop : even as 
Miss Smith, in a few weeks after she is married, no 
longer feels it strange to be called Mrs. Jones : even 
as the readers of what is with bitter irony called a 
religious newspaper lose their first bewilderment at 
finding a human animal writing an article filled with 
intentional misrepresentation, lying, and slandering, 
and ending the article by taking God to witness 
that in abusing the man he hates for his success 
and eminence, he is actuated by a simple regard to 
the Divine glory. 

And thus it is, remembering how the old time 
and the old way fade out, that the writer has re- 
solved to give a little space of comparative rest to 
reviving (as far as may be) something which used 
to have a strongly felt character of its own, in 
years which are gone, and which are melting into 
blue distance fast. Let me seek to bring up again 
the atmosphere of Going Away, as it used to be, 
and to be felt. No doubt, there is a certain fanci- 
fulness about moral atmospheres : not all men feel 
them alike ; and there are robust natures which 
probably do not feel them at all. When a man 
comes to describe a house, a landscape, a mode of 



The Old Time. 183 



life, not as these are in literal fact, but as these 
impress himself: then we get into a realm of un- 
certainty and fancy. When a man ceases to say 
of a dwelling, that it is built of red brick, that it 
has so many windows in front, that it is so many 
stories high, that it has evergreens of such kinds 
round it, and the like : and when the man goes on 
to describe the house by quite other characteristics 
— saying that it is a sleepy-looking house, a dull 
house, a hospitable-looking house, an eerie strange- 
looking house, a house that makes you feel queer 
— then you feel that though the man may convey 
to another man, who is in sympathy with himself, 
a very true impression of the fact as it presents 
itself to him, still there are many people to whom 
such descriptions are really quite unintelligible; 
and that those who are most capable of understand- 
ing them are least likely to agree as to their truth. 
It is so with what I have called moral atmospheres : 
the pervading characteristic of a time, a scene, a 
way of life, a human being. Nor can it be admitted 
that there is anything of morbid sensitiveness in 
being keenly aware of these. Most people know 
the vague sort of sense that you have of being in a 
remote pastoral country, or of being in a busy 
town. You feel a difference in the morning when- 
ever you awake ; and before you have fully gathered 
up your consciousness : it pervades your very 
dreams. You remember periods of your life about 



184 A Reminisce7ice of 

which there was a kind of flavour; strongly-felt, 
but indescribable to others : not to be expressed in 
any spoken words : Mendelssohn or Beethoven 
might have come near expressing it in music : and 
it comes back upon you in reading some pas- 
sage In Memoriam which has nothing to do with 
it, or in looking at the first yellow crocus in the 
cold March sunshine, or in walking along a lane 
with blossoming hawthorn on either hand, or in 
smelling "the blossoms of an apple-tree. And when 
you look back, you feel the atmosphere surround 
you again, with its fragrance a good deal gone, 
and with its colours faded. It is a misty, ghost- 
like image of a past life and its surroundings, that 
steals vaguely before your mental sight : and pos- 
sibly it cannot be more accurately or expressively 
described, than by saying that the old time comes 
over you. 

Doubtless external scenery has a great deal to 
do in the production of that general sense of a 
character pervading one's whole mode of life, which 
I mean by a moral atmosphere. It is especially 
so if you lead a lonely life : or if you have not 
many companions, and these not very energetic or 
striking. How well many men in orders remember 
the peculiar flavour of the time when they first 
began their parochial duty ! Years afterwards, 
you go and walk up and down in the church where 
you preached your first sermons ; and you try to 



The Old Time. 



awaken the feeling of that departed time. It comes 
back, in a ghostly unsubstantial way : sometimes it 
refuses to be wakened up at all. And the feeling, 
whatever it may be, is (to many men) very mainly 
flavoured by the outward scene in which that time 
was spent. I can easily believe that there are 
persons on whose mood and character no appreci- 
able impression is produced by external scenery : 
probably the reader knows one or two. They have 
usually high cheek-bones, smoke-dried complexions, 
and disagreeable voices : they think Mr. Tennyson 
a fool, and tell you that they cannot understand 
him, in a tone that conveys that in their judgment 
nobody can. I have known men who declared 
honestly that they did not think Westminster 
Abbey in the least a more solemn place than a 
red brick meeting-house with a flat ceiling, and 
with its inner walls chastely whitewashed, or pa- 
pered with a paper representing yellow marble. 
My acquaintance with such individuals was slight : 
and by mutual consent it speedily ceased. Give 
us the man who frankly tells you how different a 
man he is in this place from what he is in that : 
how outward nature casts its light or its shadow 
upon all his thinking and feeling. What would 
you be, my friend, if you lived for months by a 
misty Shetland sea ; or amid a wide Irish bogland ; 
or in a wooden chalet at Meyringen ; or on a flat 
French plain, with white ribbons of highway 



1 86 A Reminiscence of 



stretching across it, bordered with weary poplars ; 
or under the shadow of castle-crowned crags upon 
the Rhine ; or amid the bustle of a great commercial 
town ; or in the classic air of an ancient university 
city, with a feast of Gothic everywhere for the eyes, 
and with courts of velvety turf that has been velvety 
turf for ages ? But here I get into the region of the 
fanciful ; and though holding very strongly a certain 
theory about these things, I am not going to set it 
out here. Yet I cannot but believe, that when you 
read men's written thoughts, you may readily, if 
you be of a sensitive nature, feel the surroundings 
amid which they were written. Turn over the 
volume which was written in the country, by a man 
keenly alive to outward things and their influences ; 
and you will be aware of a breeziness about the 
pages : a fresher air seems to breathe from them, 
the atmosphere of that simple life and its little 
cares. Turn over the Best of all books : read espe- 
cially the accounts of patriarchal times in Genesis : 
and (inspiration apart) you will feel the presence of 
something indefinitely more than the bare facts 
recorded. You will feel the fresh breeze come to 
you over the ocean of intervening centuries : you 
will know that a whole life and its interests surround 
you again. And there seems to me no more marked 
difference between fictitious stories written by men 
of genius and written by commonplace people, than 
this : that the commonplace people make you aware 



The Old Time. 187 

of just the incidents they record ; while the man of 
genius makes you aware of a vast deal more — of 
the entire atmosphere of the surrounding circum- 
stances and concerns and life. You will understand 
what is meant when I remind you of the wonderful 
way in which the battle of Waterloo is made to 
surround and pervade a certain portion of the train 
of events recorded in that thoroughly true history, 
Mr. Thackeray's Vanity Fair. 

Now all this is pleasant. I mean to the writer; 
not necessarily to the reader. The writer has to 
produce a multitude of pages, which to produce is 
of the nature of grave work ; and in them he must 
hold right on, and discuss his subject under no 
small sense of responsibility. But such pages as 
this are his play; and he may without rebuke turn 
hither and thither, and pluck the wild flowers on 
either side of the path. Oh, how hard work it is to 
write a sermon ; and (when one is in the vein) how 
easy it is to write an essay ! And in saying that all 
this is pleasant, the thing present to the author's 
mind was the very devious course which his train 
of thought has followed since the first sentence of 
this dissertation was written. I have a great respect 
for certain men, who write in a logical and scholarly 
way. I admire and esteem such. When I read 
their productions at all, I do so after breakfast, 
when one's wits are fully awake. But in the evening, 
by the fireside, when the day's work and worry are 



A Reminiscence of 



over, and there remains the precious little breathing- 
space, I would rather not read them. Neither do I 
desire here to write like them. 

Going Away is my subject. Going Away and 
its atmosphere, as it used to be, and as it is to 
many people now. Going Away from home. Not 
Going Away for ever ; not Going Away for a long 
time ; not Going Away under painful circumstances. 
Ordinary and commonplace Going Away. 

And let me tell you, intrepid travellers, who think 
nothing of flying away to London, to Paris, to 
Chamouni, to Constantinople; that Going Away 
for a week or two, and to a distance not exceeding 
a hundred miles, is a very serious thing to a quiet, 
stay-at-home person. A multitude of contingencies 
suggest themselves in its prospect : there is the 
vague fear of the great, terrible outside world. It 
is as when a little boat, that has been lying safe in 
some sheltered cove, puts out to sea, to face the full 
might of winds and waves ; when a lonely human 
being, who for months has plodded his little round 
of work and care, looking at the same scenes, and 
conversing with the same people, musters courage 
to go away for a little while. There is a consider- 
able inertia to overcome ; some effort of resolution 
is needed. When you have lived an unvaried life for 
many weeks in a quiet country place, your wish is 
to sit still. Yet there are great advantages which 
belong to people who have seen little or nothing. 



The Old Time. 189 



They have so keen a sense of Interest, and so lively 
an impression of the facts, in beholding something 
new. By-and-by they come to take it easily. You 
look out of the window of the railway carriage, and 
in reply to something said by a fellow traveller, 
you say, 'Ah, that's Berne, or that's Lausanne,' and 
you return to your Times, or your Saturday Review. 
You look forth on the left hand, as the train rounds 
a curve, and say, ' Strasburg spire ; very fine. Four 
hundred and fifty feet high. It does not look nearly 
so much from this point' Now once it was very 
different It was a vivid sensation to see for the 
first time some town in England, or some lake or 
hill in Scotland. My friend Smith told me that 
once, for more than six years, beginning when he 
was eight and twenty, he never had stirred ten 
miles from his home and his parish, save when he 
went in the autumn for a few weeks to the seaside ; 
and then he went always to the same place, a 
journey of four hours or so. It would have done him 
much good, had he been able sometimes through 
those years, which were very anxious and very 
trying ones, to have the benefit of a little change of 
scene. But he could not afford it; and in those 
days of depressed fortune, he had, literally, not a 
friend in this world, beyond the little circle of his 
own home. He had, indeed, some acquaintances; 
but they were able to understand him, or sympathise 
with him, about as much as a donkey could. But 



I go A Reminiscence of 

better days came ; as (let us trust) they will come, 
through hard work and self-denial to most men, by 
God's blessing; and Smith could venture on the 
great enterprise of a journey to London. Ah ! an 
express train was a great thing to him; and a 
journey of three hundred miles an endless pilgrim- 
age. And he told me himself (he is in his grave 
now, and no one who knew him will know him by 
what has been said of him) that it was an extra- 
ordinary feeling to look out of the carriage-window, 
and to think, Now Cambridge is only a few miles 
off, over these flats ! And farther on, when the 
trains glided by the capital of the Fens, and the 
noble mass of Peterborough Cathedral loomed 
through the misty morning, it was a stranger object 
to him than St. Sophia or even the Mosque of Omar 
would be to you ; and he thought how curious a 
thing it would be to live on that wide plain, in that 
quiet little city, under the shadow of that magnifi- 
cent pile. Probably, my friend, you have been long 
enough in many striking places to feel their first 
interest and impression go : to feel their moral 
atmosphere become inappreciable. You feel all that 
keenly at first; but gradually the place becomes 
just like anywhere else. After a while, the inner 
atmosphere overpowers the outer : the world within 
the breast gives its tone and colour to the scene 
around you. I believe firmly, that if you want to 
know a place vividly and really (I mean a town 



The Old Time. 191 



of moderate extent), you ought to stay in it just a 
day and no more. By remaining longer, you may 
come to know all the churches and shops, and the 
like; but you will lose the pervading atmosphere 
and character of the whole. First impressions are 
always the most vivid ; and I firmly believe they 
are in the vast majority of cases the most truthful. 
An observant and sensitive man, spending just a 
day in a town with twenty thousand inhabitants, 
knows what kind of place that town is, far better 
than an ordinarily observant person who has lived in 
it for twenty years. 

The truth is, that a little of a thing is usually far 
more impressive than the whole of it, or than a 
great deal of it. Don't you remember how, when 
you were a child, lying in bed in the morning, you 
used to watch the day-light through the shutters } 
And you remember how bright it looked, through 
the narrow line where the shutters hardly met : it 
was like a glowing fire. At length, the shutters 
were thrown back, and they let in all the day ; and 
it was nothing so bright. Even if the morning was 
sunshiny, there was a sad falling off: and perhaps 
the morning was dull and rainy. Even so is the 
glimpse of Peterborough from the passing express 
train, infinitely finer than the view of Peterborough 
to the man who lives in it all the year round. Even 
so has the quiet life of a cathedral city, a charm to 
the visitor for a day, who has come from a land 



192 A Reminiscence of 

where cathedrals are not, which fades away to such 
as spend all their days in the venerable place ; and 
come to have associations not merely of glorious 
architecture and sublime music, but likewise of 
many petty ambitions, jealousies, diplomacies, and 
disappointments; and in short of Mr. Slope and 
Mrs. Proudie. Yes, a little of a thing is sometimes 
infinitely better than the whole : and it is the little 
which especially has power to convey that general 
estimate of a pervading characteristic which we 
understand by perceiving the moral atmosphere. 
And besides this, you may have a surfeit of even 
the things you like best. You heartily enjoy a 
little country Gothic church : you linger on every 
detail of it : it is a pure delight. But a great cathe- 
dral is almost too much : it wearies you : it over- 
whelms you. You may get, through one summer 
day, as much enjoyment out of Sonning Church, as 
out of York Minster. That perfection of an EngHsh 
parish church, with its perfect vicarage, by the 
beautiful Thames, is like a friend with whom you 
can cordially shake hands: the great minster is like 
a monarch to be approached on bended knee. 
Most people remember a case in which a thousandth 
part would have been far better than the whole : I 
mean the Great Exhibition in that fine shed which 
the nation declined to buy. You would have enjoyed 
the sight of a little of what was gathered there : but 
the whole was a fearful task to get through. I never 



The Old Time. 193 

beheld more wearied, dazed, stuplfied, disgusted, 
and miserable countenances, than among rich and 
poor under that roof. I wonder whether any mortal 
ever really enjoyed that glare and noise and hubbub; 
or felt his soul expanded under the influence of 
that huge educational institution. Too many maga- 
zines or books, too, coming together, convert into a 
toil what ought to be a pleasure. You look at the 
mass ; and you cannot help thinking what a deal 
you have to get through. And that thought is in 
all cases fatal to enjoyment. Whenever it enters 
the heart of a little boy, contemplating his third 
plate of plum-pudding, the delight implied in plum- 
pudding has vanished. Whenever the hearer listens 
to the preacher describing what he is to do in the 
first and second place, and so on to the fifth or 
sixth, the enjoyment with which most sermons are 
heard is sensibly diminished. And even if you be 
very fond of books, there is a sense of desolation 
in being turned loose in a library of three hundred 
thousand volumes. That huge array is an incubus 
on your spirit. There is far more sensible pleasure 
when you go into a friend's snug little study, and 
diligently survey his thousand or twelve hundred 
books. And you know that if a man has a drawing- 
room a hundred feet long, he takes pains to convert 
that large room into a little one by enclosing a 
warm space round the fire with great screens for 

O 



194 ^ Reminiscence of 

his evening retreat. Yes, a little is generally much 
better than a great deal. 

A thing which precedes Going Away, is packing 
up. And this the wise man will do for himself : 
the more so, if he cannot afford to have any one 
to do it for him. There is a great pleasure in doing 
things for yourself. And here is one of the com- 
pensations of poverty. You open for yourself the 
parcel of new books you have bought ; and with 
your own hand you cut the leaves. A great peer, 
of course, could not do this, I suppose. The volumes 
would be prepared for his reading, and laid before 
him with nothing to do but to read them. Now, 
it ought to be understood, that the reading of a 
book is by no means the only use you can put it to, 
or the only good you can get out of it. There is 
the enjoyment of stripping off the massive wrap- 
pings in which the volumes travelled from the 
bookseller's shop, through devious ways, to the coun- 
try home. There is the enjoyment of cutting the 
leaves : which, if you have a large ivory paper knife, 
is a very sensible one. There is the enjoyment of 
laying the volumes, after their leaves are cut, upon 
your study table ; and sitting down in an arm-chair 
by the fireside, and calmly and thoughtfully look- 
ing at them. There is the enjoyment of considering 
earnestly the place where they shall be put on your 
shelves, and then of placing them there, and of 
arranging the volumes which have been turned out 



I 



The Old Time. 195 



to make room for them. All these pleasures you have, 
quite apart from the act of reading the books : and 
all these pleasures are denied to the rich and mighty 
man, who is too great to be allowed to do things 
for himself He has only the end : we have both 
the end and the means which lead up to it. And 
the greater part of human enjoyment is the enjoy- 
ment of means, not of ends. There is as much 
solid satisfaction in going out and looking at your 
horse in his warm stable, as in riding or driving 
him. An eminent sportsman begins a book in 
which he gives an account of his exploits in hunt- 
ing in a foreign countr}', by fondly telling how 
happy he was in petting up his old guns till they 
looked like new, and in preparing and packing 
ammunition in the prospect of setting off on his 
expedition. You can see that these tranquil and 
busy days of anticipation and preparation at home 
Avere at least as enjoyable as the more exciting 
days of actual sport which followed. Now, how- 
ever much a duke might like to do all this, I 
suppose his nobility would oblige him to forego the 
satisfaction. 

If you have a wife and children (and for the 
purposes of this essay I suppose you to have both,) 
the multitude of trunks and packing-cases in which 
their possessions are bestowed in the prospect of 
going away, are sought out and packed apart from 
any exertion or superintendence on your part. Your 



196 A Reminiscence of 

share consists in writing addresses for them ; and 
in counting up the twenty-three things that are 
assembled in the lobby before they are loaded on 
cart, cab, or carriage. I have remarked it as a 
curious thing, that when a man with his wife and two 
or three children and three or four servants go to the 
seaside in autumn, the articles of luggage invariably 
amount to twenty-three. And it has ever been to 
me a strange and perplexing thought, how so many 
trunks and boxes are needed : and how, through 
various changes by land and sea, they get safely to 
their destination. There are few positions which 
awaken more gratitude and satisfaction in the 
average human being, than (having arrived at the 
sea-side place) to see the twenty-three things safe 
upon the little pier, after the roaring steamer which 
brought them has departed, and the little crowd 
has dispersed : when, amid the stillness, suddenly be- 
come audible, you tell the keeper of the pier to send 
your baggage to the dwelling which is to be your 
temporary home. A position even more gratifying 
is as follows : when, returning to town, your holiday 
over, you succeed, by the aid of two liberally- 
tipped porters, in recovering all your effects from 
the luggage-van of the railway train, amid an awful 
crowd and confusion on the platform, and accumu- 
lating them into a heap, for whose conveyance you 
would assuredly be called to pay extra but for the 
judicious largesse already alluded to : then in seeing 



The Old Time. 197 



them piled in and upon three cabs, in which you 
slowly wend your way to your door ; and finally, 
in the lobby whence they originally started, count- 
ing up your twenty-three things once more. Yes, 
there is much pleasure attendant on the possession 
and conveyance of luggage : a pleasure mingled 
with pain, indeed, like most of our pleasures : a 
pleasure dashed with anxiety and clouded with 
confusion, yet ultimately passing into a sense of 
delightful rest and relief, as you count up the 
twenty-three things and find them all right, which 
you had hardly dared to hope they would ever be. 
So much having been said concerning the general 
luggage of the family, let us return to. the thought 
of your own personal packing. You pack your own 
portmanteau, arranging things in that order which 
long usage has led you to esteem as the best. And 
if you be a clergyman, you always introduce into 
that receptacle your sermon-case with two or three 
sermons. You do this, if you be a wise man, though 
there should not appear the faintest chance of your 
having to preach anywhere : having learned by 
experience how often and how unexpectedly such 
chances occur. And then, when your portmanteau 
is finally strapped up and ready to go, you look at 
it with a moralising glance, and think how little a 
thing it looks to hold such a great deal. It is like 
a general principle, including a host of individual 
cases. It is like a bold assertion, which you accept 



iqB a Reminiscence of 

without thinking of all it implies. And in a short 
time that compendium of things immediately need- 
ful will be one among a score like it in the luggage- 
van. Thus, the philosopher may reflect, is every 
man's own concern the most interesting to himself, 
because every man knows best what is involved in 
his own concern. 

There are many associations about the battered 
old leathern object : and it is sad to remark that it 
is wearing out. It is to many people a sensible 
trial to throw aside anything they have had for a 
long time. And this thing especially, which has 
faithfully kept so many things you intrusted to it, 
and which has gone with you to so many places, 
seems to cast a silent appealing look at you when 
you think it is getting so shabby that you must 
throw it aside. Some day you and I, my friend, 
will be like an old portmanteau ; and we shall be 
pushed out of the way to make room for something 
fresh. Probably it is worldly wisdom to treat 
trunks and men like that single-minded person Mr. 
Uppish, who steadfastly cuts his old friends as he 
gradually gets into a superior social stratum. 
Doubtless he has his reward. 

It is invariably on Monday morning that certain 
human beings Go Away, in the grave and formal 
manner which has been spoken of. I mean with an 
entire family, and with the twenty-three trunks, 



The Old Time. 199 



many of them very large ones. Not unfrequently, 
a perambulator is present ; also a nursery crib. And 
going at that especial period of the week, there is a 
certain thing inevitably associated with Going Away. 
That thing is the periodical called the Saturday 
Review. It comes every Monday morning; and 
you cut the leaves after breakfast and glance over 
it : but you put off the reading of it till the evening. 
But on those travelling days, this paper is associated 
with the forenoon. Breakfast is a hasty meal that 
day. The heavy baggage, if you dwell in the 
country, has gone away early in a cart : the railway 
station is of course five miles off. And then, just a 
quarter of an hour after the period you had named 
to your man-servant, round comes the phaeton 
which can hold so much. It comes at the very 
moment you really desired to have it : for knowing 
that your servant will always be exactly a quarter 
of an hour too late, you always order it just a 
quarter of an hour before the time you really want 
it. Phaeton of chocolate hue, picked out with 
red and white : horse of the sixteen hands and an 
inch, jet black of colour, well-bred in blood, and 
gentle of nature; where are you both to-night.^ 
Through the purple moorlands, through the rich 
cornfields, along the shady lanes, up the High-street 
of the little town, we have gone together : but the 
day came at length when you had to go one way 
and I another : and we have each gone through a 



200 A Reminiscence of 

good deal of hard work doubtless since then. 
Pleasant it is driving home from the town in the 
winter afternoon, and reaching your door when it 
has grown pretty dark: pleasant is the flood of 
mellow light that issues forth when your door is 
opened : pleasant is it to witness the unloading of 
the vast amount and variety of things which, in 
various receptacles, that far from ponderous equip- 
age could convey. Pleasant to witness the pile 
that accumulates on the topmost step before your 
door : pleasant to behold the bundle of books and 
magazines from the reading-club : pleasanter to see 
the less frequent parcel of those which you can call 
your own : pleasant to see the manifold brown- 
paper parcels enter the house, which seems to be such 
a devouring monster, craving ceaseless fresh supply. 
All this while the night is falling fast ; and the great 
trees look down ghost-like upon the little bustle 
underneath them. Then phaeton and horse depart : 
and in a little you go round to the stable-yard, and 
find your faithful steed, now dry and warm, in his snug 
stall, eagerly eating; yet bearing in a kindly way 
a few pats on the neck and a few pulls of the ears. 
And your faithful man-servant is quite sure to have 
some wonderful intelligence to convey to you, 
picked up in town that afternoon. In the country, 
you have not merely the enjoyment of rich summer 
scenery ; of warm sunsets and green leaves shining 
golden : there is a peculiar pleasure known to the 



The Old Time. 201 



thorough country man, in the most wintry aspects 
of nature. The bleak trees and sky outside, the 
moan of the rising wind presaging a wild night, and 
the brawl of the swollen brook that runs hard by, 
all make one value the warmth and light and com- 
fort within doors about forty times as much as you 
could value these simple blessings in a great city, 
where they seem quite natural, and matters of 
course. Of course, a great man would not care for 
these things ; and would despise the small human 
being that does care for them. Let the great man 
take his own way ; and let the small human being 
be allowed to follow his in peace. 

This, however, is a deviation to an evening on 
which you come home : whereas our proper subject 
is a morning on which you go away from home. 
The phaeton has come to the door : many little 
things go in : finally the passengers take their seats, 
and the thick rugs are tucked in over their knees : 
then you take the reins (for you drive yourself), 
and you wind away outward till you enter the 
highway. The roads are smooth and firm : and for 
all the heavy load behind him, the black horse trots 
briskly away. Have I not beheld a human being, 
his wife, two children, a man-servant, and a woman- 
servant, steadily skimming along at a respectable 
nine miles an hour, with but one living creature for 
all the means of locomotion } And the living crea- 
ture was shining and plump, and unmistakably 



202 A Reminiscence of 

happy. The five miles are overcome, and you enter 
the court-yard of your little railway station. There, 
in a heap, cunningly placed on the platform where 
the luggage-van may be expected to rest when the 
train stops, is your luggage. The cart has been 
faithful : there are the twenty-three things. You 
have driven the last mile or two under a certain 
fear lest you might be too late ; and that fear will 
quicken an unsophisticated country pulse. But you 
have ten minutes to spare. There are no people 
but your own party to divide the attention of the 
solitary porter. At length, a mile off, along the 
river bank, you discern the sinuous train : in a little, 
the tremendously energetic locomotive passes by 
you, and the train is at rest. You happily find a 
compartment which is empty; and there you 
swiftly bestow your living charge : and having done 
this you hasten to witness the safe embarkation of 
the twenty-three trunks and packages. All this 
must be done rapidly: and of course you take 
much more trouble than a more experienced tra- 
veller would. And when at length you hurriedly 
climb into your place, you sink down in your seat, 
and feel a delicious sense of quiet. The morning 
has been one of worry, after all. But now you are 
all right, for the next four hours. And that is a 
long look forward. You keenly appreciate this 
blink of entire rest. Your unaccustomed nerves 
have been stretched by that fear of being late : 



The Old Time. 203 



then there was the hurry of getting the children 
into their carriage, and seeing after the twenty- 
three things : and now comes a reaction. For a 
few miles it is enough just to sit still, and look at 
the faces beside you and opposite you : and espe- 
cially to watch the wonder imprinted on the two 
round little faces looking out of the window. First, 
looking out on either side, there is a deep gorge : 
great trees : rocks on one side, and on the other 
side a river. By-and-by the golden gleam of ripe 
corn-fields in the sunshine on either hand lightens 
up all faces. And now, forth from its bag comes 
the Saturday Review ; and you read it luxuriously, 
with frequent pauses and lookings out between. 
Do the keen, sharp, brilliant men who write those 
trenchant paragraphs ever think of the calm 
enjoyment they are providing for simple minds ? 
Although you do not care in the least about the 
subject discussed, there is a keen pleasure in 
remarking the skill and pith and felicity with which 
the writer discusses it. You feel a certain satisfac- 
tion in thinking that every Monday since that 
periodical started on its career, you have read it. 
It is a sort of intellectual thing to do. You reflect 
with pleasure on the statement made on oath by a 
witness in a famous trial. He described a certain 
person as ' a sensible and intelligent man who took 
in the Times' What proof, then, of scholarly likings, 
and of power to appreciate what not everybody can 



204 A Reminiscence of 

appreciate, should be esteemed as furnished by the fact 
that a man pays for and reads the Saturday Review ? 

Now here, my reader, we have reached the very 
article of Going Away. Many are the thoughts 
through which we approached it : here it is at last. 
Behold the human being, about the first day of 
August, seated in a corner of a railway carriage, 
whose cushions are luxurious, and whose general 
effect is of blue cloth within, and varnished teak 
without. Opposite the human being sits his wife. 
Pervading the carriage you may behold two chil- 
dren. And carefully tending them, and seeking 
vainly to keep them quiet, you may (in very many 
cases, for such excellent persons are happily not 
uncommon) discern a certain nurse, who is as a 
member of that little family circle : more than a 
trusted and valued servant ; even a faithful friend. 
That is how human beings Go Away. That is the 
kind of picture which rises in the writer's mind, and 
in the mind of very many people in a like station 
in this life, when looking back over not many years. 

There is a certain cumbrous enjoyment in all 
Going Away, bearing with you all these impedi- 
Tfiejita : even when you are going merely for a 
Christmas week or the like. But the great Going 
Away is at the beginning of your autumn holidays. 
And thinking of this, I feel the prospect change 
from country to town : I think how the human being, 
wearied out by many months of hard work amid 



The Old Time. 205 

city bustle and pressure, leaves these behind ; how 
the little children shut up their school-books, and 
their tired instructors are off for their turn of much- 
needed recreation : how the churches are emptied, 
and the streets deserted : how the congregation, 
assembled in one place on the last Sunday of July, 
is before the next one scattered far and wide, like 
the fragments of a bursting bombshell. But it is 
not now, in this mid-term of work, that one can 
recall the feelings of commencing holiday-time. 
Meanwhile, you are out of sympathy with it : and 
every good thing is beautiful in its time. 

Was it worth while, thus to revive things so long 
past } It has been pleasant for the writer ; and a 
hundred things not recorded here have been 
awakened in the retrospect. And when these pages 
meet the right people's eye, they may serve to re- 
call simple modes of being and doing which are 
melting fast away. For the experience of ordinary 
mortals is remarkably uniform ; and most of the 
people you know are in many respects extremely 
like yourself Now let us cease, and sit down and 
think. There is indeed a temptation to go on. One 
would rather not stop in the middle of a page ; I 
mean a manuscript page : and it is almost too much 
for human nature to know that we may add a few 
sentences more, and they will not be cut off. And 
there are positions too much for human nature. A 



2o6 A Reminiscence of 

sense of power and authority, as a general rule, is 
more than the average man can bear. Not long 
since I beheld, in the superhuman dignity of a po- 
liceman, something which deeply impressed this on 
my mind. The kitchen chimney of this dwelling 
caught fire. It is contrary to municipal law to let 
your kitchen chimney catch fire ; and very properly 
so : so there was a fine to be paid. On a certain 
day, I was told there was a policeman in the kitchen, 
who desired an interview. I proceeded thither, and 
found him there. No language can convey an idea 
of the stern and unyielding severity of that eminent 
man's demeanour. He seemed to think I would 
probably plead with him to let Justice turn from 
her rigid course ; and he sought, by his whole bear- 
ing, to convey that any such pleading would be 
futile ; and that, whatever might be said, the half- 
crown must be paid, to be applied to public pur- 
poses. When I entered his presence, he sternly 
asked me what was my name. Of course, he knew 
my name just as well as I did myself: but there 
was something in the requirement fitted to make me 
feel my humble position before him. And having 
received the information, he made a note of it in a 
little book : and conveying that serious consequences 
would follow, he departed. A similar manifestation 
may be found in the case of magistrates in small 
authority. I have heard of such an individual, who 
dispensed justice from a seedy little bench with an 



The Old Time. 207 



awful state. He sat upon that bench, all alone : 
and no matter of the smallest importance ever came 
before him. Yet when expressing his opinion, he 
never failed to state that THE COURT thought so 
and so. A vague impression of dignity thus w^as 
made to surround the workings of the individual 
mind. It once befell, that certain youthful students, 
in a certain ancient university, had a strife with the 
police : and being captured by the strong arm of 
the law, were conveyed before such a magistrate. 
Sitting upon the judgment seat, he sternly upbraid- 
ed the youths for their discreditable behaviour; 
adding, that it gave him special sorrow to witness 
such lawless violence in the case of individuals who 
were receiving a university eddication. He did not 
know, that unhappy magistrate, that there stood at 
his bar one whose audacious heart quailed not in 
his presence. ' Stop,' exclaimed that unutterably 
irreverent youth, interrupting the stern magistrate : 
* let me entreat you to pronounce the word properly : 
it is not EDDICATION, it is EDUCATION.' And the 
magistrate's dignity suddenly collapsed, like a 
blown-up bladder when you insert a penknife. This 
incident is recorded to have happened at Timbuctoo, 
in the last century. I have no doubt the story is 
not true. Hardly any stories are true. Yet I have 
often heard it related. And like the legend of The 
Ass a7id the Archbishop, which is utterly without 
foundation, you feel that it ought to be true. 



CHAPTER X. 
CONCERNING OLD ENEMIES. 




T may be assumed as certain, that most 
readers of this page have on some occa- 
sion climbed a high hill. It may be 
esteemed as probable, that when half-way up, they 
felt out of breath and tired. It is extremely likely 
that, having come to some inviting spot, they sat 
down and rested for a little, before passing on to 
the summit. Now, my reader, if you have done all 
that, I feel assured that you must have remarked 
as a fact that though when you sit down you cease 
to make progress, you do not go back. Yo do not 
lose the ground already gained. But if you ever 
think at all, even though it should be as little as 
possible, you must have discerned the vexatious 
truth that in respect of another and more important 
kind of progress, unless you keep going on, you 
begin to go back. You struggle, in a moral sense, 
up the steep slope : and you sit down at the top, 
thinking to yourself. Now that is overcome. But 



Concerning Old Enemies. 209 

after resting for a while you look round : and lo ! 
insensibly you have been sliding down ; and you 
are back again at the foot of the eminence you 
climbed with so much pain and toil. 

There are certain enemies with which every 
worthy human being has to fight, as regards which 
you will feel, as you go on, that this principle holds 
especially true: the principle that if you do not 
keep going forward, you will begin to lose ground 
and go backward. It is not enough to knock these 
enemies on the head for once. In your inexperi- 
enced days you will do this : and then, seeing that 
they look quite dead, you will fancy they will never 
trouble you any more. But you will find out, to 
your painful cost, that those enemies of yours and 
mine must be knocked on the head repeatedly. One 
knocking, though the severest, will not suffice. They 
keep always reviving : and struggling to their feet 
again : a little w^eak at first through the battering 
you gave them ; but in a very short time as vigor- 
ous and mischievous as ever. The Frenchman, 
imperfectly acquainted with the force of English 
words, and eager that extremest vengeance should 
be wreaked on certain human foes, cried aloud, 
' Kill them very oftex ! ' And that, my friend, 
as regards the worst enemies we have got, is pre- 
cisely what you and I must do. 

If we are possessed of common sense to even a 
limited amount, we must know quite well who are 

P 



2IO Concerning Old Enemies, 

our worst enemies. Not Miss Limejuice, who tells 
lies to make you appear a conceited, silly, and 
ignorant person. Nor Mr. Snarling, who diligently 
strives to prevent your reaching something you 
would like, because (as he says) the disappointment 
will do you good. Not the human curs that gnarl 
at your heels when you attain some conspicuous 
success or distinction ; which probably you worked 
hard for, and waited long for. Not these. ' A 
man's foes,' by special eminence and distinction, are 
even nearer him than 'they of his own house:' a 
man's worst enemies are they of his own heart and 
soul. The enemies that do you most harm ; and 
probably that cause you most suffering ; are ten- 
dencies and feelings in yourself If all within the 
citadel were right : if the troop of thoughts and 
affections there were orderly and well-disposed 
and well-guided : we should be very independent 
of the enemies outside. Outside temptation can 
never make a man do wrong, till something inside 
takes it by the hand, and fraternizes with it, and 
sides with it. The bad impulse within must walk 
up arm in arm with the bad impulse from without, 
and introduce it to the will, before the bad impulse 
from without, however powerful it may be, can make 
man or woman go astray from right. All this, 
however, may be taken for granted. What I wish 
to impress on the reader is this : that in fighting 
with these worst enemies, it is not enough for once 



C oncer nmg Old Enemies, 1 1 1 

to cut them down, smash them, bray them in a 
mortar. If you were fighting with a Chinese inva- 
der ; and if you were to send a rifle bullet through 
his head, or in any other way to extinguish his 
life ; you would feel that he was done with. You 
would have no more trouble from tJiat quarter. 
But once shoot or slash the ugly beast which is 
called Envy, or Self-Conceit, or Unworthy Ambi- 
tion, or Hasty Speaking, or general Foolishness : 
and you need not plume yourself that you will not 
be troubled any more with him. Let us call the 
beast by the general name of Besetting Sin : 
and let us recognise the fact that though you never 
willingly give it a moment's quarter, though you 
smash in its head (in a moral sense) with a big 
stone, though you kick it (in a moral sense) till it 
seems to be lying quite lifeless ; in a little while it 
will be up again, as strong as ever. And the only 
way to keep it down, is to knock it on the skull 
afresh every time it begins to lift up its ugly face. 
Or, to go back to my first figure : you have climbed, 
by a hard effort, up to a certain moral elevation. 
You have reached a position, climbing up the great 
ascent that leads towards God, at which you feel 
resigned to God's will ; and kindly disposed to all 
your fellow-creatures, even to such as have done 
you a bad turn already, and will not fail to do the 
like again. You also feel as if your heart were not 
set, as it once used to be, upon worldly aims and 



2 1 2 Concerni7tg Old Enemies. 

ends : but as if you were really day by day working 
towards something quite different and a great deal 
higher. You feel humble : patient : charitable. You 
sit down there, on that moral elevation, satisfied 
with yourself; and thinking to yourself: Now, I 
am a humble, contented, kindly, Christian human 
being ; and I am so for life. And let it be said 
thankfully. If you keep always on the alert, always 
watching against any retrogression, always with a 
stone ready to knock any old enemy on the head, 
always looking and seeking for a strength beyond 
your own, — you may remain all that for life. But if 
you grow lazy and careless, in a very little while 
you will have glided a long way down the hill again. 
You will be back at your old evil ways. You will 
be eager to get on, and as set on this world as if 
this world were all : you will find yourself hitting 
hard the man who has hit you : envying and de- 
tracting from the man who has surpassed you : 
and all the other bad things. Or if you do not 
retrograde so far as that : if you pull yourself up 
before the old bad im.pulse within you comes to 
actual bad deeds : still you will know that the old 
bad impulse within you is stirring ; and that, by 
God's help, you must give it another stab. 

Now this is disheartening. When, by making a 
great effort, very painful and very long, you have 
put such a bad impulse down, it is very natural to 
think that it will never vex you any more. The 



Concerning' Old Enemies. 



dragon has been trampled under the horse's feet : 
its head has been cut off: surely you are done 
with it. You have ruled your spirit into being right 
and good : into being magnanimous, kindly, humble. 
And then you fancied you might go a-head to some- 
thing more advanced : you had got over the Pons 
Asinoruni in the earnest moral work of life. You 
have extirpated the wolves from your England : and 
now you miay go on to destroy the m.oles. The 
wolves are all lying dead, each stabbed to the heart. 
You honestly believe that you have got beyond 
them ; and that whatever new enemies may assail 
you, the old ones, at least, are done with finally. But 
the wolves get up again. The old enemies revive. 
I have sometimes wondered whether those men 
who have done much to help you and me in the 
putting down of our worst enemies, have truly and 
finally slain those enemies as far as concerns them- 
selves. Is the man, in reading whose pages I feel 
I am subjected to a healthful influence, that puts 
down the unworthy parts of my nature, and that 
makes me feel more kindly, magnanimous, hopeful, 
and earnest than when left to myself: is that man, 
I wonder, always as good himself as for the time 
he makes me 1 Or can it be true that the man who 
seems not merely to have knocked on the head the 
lower impulses of his own nature ; but to have done 
good to you and ,me, my friend, by helping to kill 
those impulses within us : has still to be fighting 



2 T 4 Concerning Old Enemies. 

away with beasts, like St. Paul at Ephesus : still 
to be lamenting, on many days, that the ugly faces 
of suspicion, jealousy, disposition to retaliate when 
assailed, and the like, keep wakening up and flying 
at him again ? I fear it is so. I doubt whether 
the human being lives in whom evil, however long 
and patiently trodden down, does not sometimes 
erect its crest, and hiss, and need to be trodden 
down again. Vain thoughts and fancies, long ex- 
tinguished, will waken up : unworthy tendencies 
will give a push, now and then. And especially, I 
believe it is a great delusion to fancy that a man 
who writes in a healthy and kindly strain is what 
he counsels. If he be an honest and earnest man, 
I believe that he is striving after that which he 
counsels ; and that he is aiming at the spirit and 
temper which he sets out. I think I can generally 
make out what are a moral or religious writer's 
besetting sins, by remarking what are the virtues 
he chiefly magnifies. He is struggling after those 
virtues : struggling to break away from the corre- 
sponding errors and failings. If you find a man who 
in all he writes is scrupulously fair and temperate, 
it is probable that he is a very excitable and pre- 
judiced person : but that he knows it and honestly 
strives against it. An author who always expresses 
himself with remarkable calmness, is probably by 
nature a ferocious and savage man. But you may 
see in the way in which he restricts himself in the 



Concerning Old Enemies. 215 

matter of adjectives, and in which he excludes the 
superlative degree, that he is making a determined 
effort to put down his besetting sin. And probably 
he fancies, quite honestly, that he has finally 
knocked that enemy on the head. The truth no 
doubt is, that it is because the enemy is still alive, 
and occasionally barking and biting, that it is kept 
so well in check. There is just enough of the old 
beast surviving, to compel attention to it : the at- 
tention which consists in keeping a foot always on 
its head, and in occasionally giving it a vehement 
whack. The most eminent good qualities in human 
beings are generally formed by diligent putting 
down of the corresponding evil qualities. It was a 
stutterer who became the greatest ancient orator. 
It was a man who still bore on his satyr face the 
indications of his old satyr nature, who became the 
best of heathens. And as with Socrates and De- 
mosthenes, it has been with many more. If a man 
writes always very judiciously, rely upon it he has 
a strong tendency to foolishness : but he is keeping 
it tight in check. If a man writes always very 
kindly and charitably, depend upon it he is fighting 
to the death a tendency to bitterness and uncharit- 
ableness. 

A faithful and earnest preacher, resolved to say no 
more than he has known and felt ; and remembering 
the wise words of Dean Alford, ' What thou hast 
not by suffering bought, presume thou not to teach ;' 



2 1 6 Concerning Old Enemies. 

would necessarily show to a sharp observer a great 
deal of himself and his inner being : even though 
rigidly avoiding the slightest suspicion of egotism in 
his preaching. And it need hardly be said that 
egotism is not to be tolerated in the pulpit. 

After you have in an essay or a sermon described 
and condemned some evil tendency that is in human 
nature, you are ready to think that you have finally 
overcome it. And after you have described and 
commended some good disposition, j^ou are ready to 
think that you have attained it ; and that you will 
not lose it again. And for the time, if you be an 
honest man, you have smashed the foe ; you Jiave 
gained the vantage ground. But, woe's me, the good 
disposition dies away ; and the foe gradually revives, 
and struggles to his legs again. Let us not fancy 
that because we have been (as we fancied) once right, 
we shall never go wrong. We must be always watch- 
ful. The enemy that seemed most thoroughly 
beaten, may (apart from God's grace) beat us yet. 
The publican, when he went up to the temple to 
pray, expressed himself in a fashion handed down to 
all ages with the imprimatur upon it. Yet, for all 
his speaking so fairly, the day might come when, 
having grown a reformed character and gained ge- 
neral approbation, he would stand in a conspicuous 
place and thank God that he was not as other men. 
Let us trust tJiat day never came. Yet, if the pub- 
lican had said to himself, as he went down to his 



Conce7niing Old Enemies. 2 1 7 

house, Xovv-, I have attained an excellent pitch of 
morality : I am all right : I am a model for future 
generations : that day would be very likely to come. 
It is a humiliating and discouraging sight to be- 
hold a man plainly succumbing to an enemy which 
you fancied he had long got over. You may have 
seen an individual of more than middle age making 
a fool of himself by carrying on absurd flirtations 
with vounc^ o-irls, who were babies in lon^-- clothes 
when he first was spoony. You Avould have said, 
looking at such a man's outward aspect, and know- 
ing something of his history, that years had brought 
this compensation for what they had taken away, 
that he would not make a conspicuous ass of him- 
self any more. But the old enemy is too much for 
him : and oh how long that man's ears would appear, 
if the inner ass could be represented out^\ardly! 
You may have seen such a one, after passing through 
a discipline which you would have expected to sober 
him, evincing a frantic exhilaration in the prospect 
of his third marrias^e. And vou mav ha\-e witnessed 
a person evincing a high degree of a folly he had 
unsparingly scourged in others. I have beheld, in 
old folk, manifestations of absurdity all very well in 
the very young, which suggested to me the vision 
of a stiff, spavined, lame, broken-down old hack, fit 
only for the knacker, trying to jauntily scamper 
about in a field with a set of spirited, fresh young 
colts. And looking at the spectacle, I have reflected 



2 1 8 Concerning Old Enemies. 

on the true statement of the Venerable Bede, that 
there are no fools like old fools. 

But here it may be said, that we are not to sup- 
pose that a thing is wrong, unless it can bear to be 
looked back on in cold blood. Many a word is 
spoken, and many a deed done, and fitly too, in the 
warmth of the moment, which will not bear the day- 
light of a time when the excitement is over. Mr. 
Caudle was indignant when his wife reminded him 
of his sayings before marriage. They sounded fool- 
ish now in Caudle's ears. This did not suffice to 
show that those sayings were not very fit at the 
time : nor does it prove that the tendency to say 
many things under strong feeling is an enemy to 
be put down. You have said, with a trembling voice, 
and with the tear in your eye, things which are no 
discredit to you : though you might not be dis- 
posed to say the like just after coming out of 
your bath in the morning. You needed to be warmed 
up to a cerfain pitch : and then the spark was struck 
off. And only a very malicious or a very stupid 
person would remind you of these things when you 
are not in a correspondent vein. 

And now that we have had this general talk about 
these old enemies, let us go on to look at some of 
them individually. It may do us good to poke up a 
few of the beasts, and to make them arise and walk 
about in their full ugliness : and then to smite them 



Conce7^ning Old Enemies. 2 1 9 

on the head as with a hammer. Let this be a new 
slaying of the slain, who never can be slain too often. 
Perhaps you may not agree with me when I say 
that one of these beasts is Ambition. I mean un- 
scrupulous self-seeking. You resolved, long ago, 
to give no harbour to that : and so to exclude the 
manifold evils that came of it. You determined 
that you would resolutely refuse to scheme, or push, 
or puff, or hide your honest opinions, or dodge in 
any way, for the purpose of getting on. You know 
how eager some people are to let their light shine 
before men, to the end that men may think what 
clever fellows those people are. You know how 
anxious some men are to set themselves right in 
newspapers and the Hke : and to stand fair (as they 
call it) with the public. You know how some men, 
when they do any good work, have recourse to 
means highly analogous to the course adopted by a 
class of persons long ago, who sounded a trumpet 
before them in the streets to call attention to their 
charitable deeds. I know individuals who constantly 
sound their own trumpet, and that a very brazen 
one : sound it in conversation, in newspaper para- 
graphs, in advertisements, in speeches at public 
meetings. But you, an honest and modest person, 
were early disgusted by that kind of thing : and 
you determined that you would do your duty quietly 
and faithfully, spending all your strength upon your 
work, and not sparing a large percentage of it for 



2 20 Concerning Old Enemies. 

the trumpet. You resolved that you would never 
admit the thought of setting yourself more favour- 
ably before your fellow-creatures. You learned to 
look your humble position in the face : and to dis- 
card the idea of getting any mortar to think you 
greater or better than you are. Yes : you hope that 
the petty self-seeking, which keeps some men ever 
on the strut and stretch, has been outgrown by you. 
Yet if you would be safe from one of the most con- 
temptible foes of all moral manhood, you must keep 
your club in your hand ; and every now and then 
quiet the creature by giving it a heavy blow on the 
head. St. Paul tells us that he had '■ learned to be 
content' It cost him effort. It cost him time. It 
was not natural. He came down, we may be sure, 
with many a heavy stroke, on the innate disposition 
to repine when things did not go in the way he 
wanted them. And that is what we must do. 

As you look back now, it is likely enough that you 
recall a time when self-seeking seemed thoroughly 
dead in you. You were not very old, perhaps : yet 
you fancied that (by God's help) you had outgrown 
ambition. You did your work as well as you could ; 
and in the evening you sat in your easy chair by the 
fireside : looking not without interest at the feverish 
race of worldly competition, yet free from the least 
thought of running in it. As for thinking of your 
own eminence, or imagining that any one would take 
the trouble of talking about you, //^^/ never entered 



Concerninor Old Enemies. 221 

your mind. And as you beheld the eager pushing 
of other men, and their frantic endeavours to keep 
themselves before the human race, you wondered 
what worldly inducement would lead you to do the 
like. But did you always keep in that happy con- 
dition ? Did you not, now and then, feel some little 
waking up of the old thing : and become aware that 
you were being drawn into the current ? If so, let 
us hope that you resolutely came out of it : and 
that you found quiet in the peaceful backvv-ater, 
apart from that horrible feverish stream. 

There is another old enemy, a two-headed mon- 
ster, that is not done with when it has been killed 
once. It is a near relative of the last : it is the ugly 
creature Self-Conceit and Envy. I call it a two- 
headed monster, rather than two monsters ; it is a 
double manifestation of one evil principle : Self- 
Conceit is the principle as it looks at yourself; Envy 
is the same thing as it looks at other men. I fear it 
must be admitted that there is in human nature a 
disposition to talk bitterly of people who are more 
eminent and successful than yourself: and though 
you expel it with a pitchfork, that old enemy will 
come back again. This disposition exists in many 
walks of hfe. A Lord Chancellor has left on record 
his opinion, that nowhere is there so much envy and 
jealousy as among the members of the Enghsh bar. 
A great actor has declared that nowhere is there so 



222 Concer7iing Old Enemies, 

much as among actors and actresses. Several 
authors have maintained that no human beings are 
so bitter at seeing one of themselves get on a little, 
as literary folk. And a popular preacher has been 
heard to say that envy and detraction go their 
greatest length among preachers. Let us hope that 
the last statement is erroneous. But I fear that 
these testimonies, coming from quarters so various, 
lead to the conclusion that envy and detraction 
(which imply self-conceit) are too natural and com- 
mon everywhere. You may have heard a number 
of men talking about one man in their own vocation 
who had got a good deal ahead of them : and who 
never had done them any harm except thus getting 
ahead of them : and you may have been amazed at 
the awful animosity evinced towards the successful 
man. But success, in others, is a thing which some 
mortals cannot forgive. You may have known 
people savagely abuse a man because he set up a 
carriage, or because he moved to a finer house, or 
because he bought an estate in the country. You 
remember the outburst which followed when Ma- 
caulay dated a letter from Windsor Castle. Of 
course, the true cause of the outburst was, that 
Macaulay should have been at Windsor Castle at 
all. Let us be thankful, my friend, that such an 
eminent distinction is not likely to happen either to 
you or me : we have each acquaintances who would 
never forgive us if it did. What a raking up of all 



Concerning Old Enemies. 



the sore points in your history would follow, if the 
Queen were to ask you to dinner ! And if you 
should ever succeed to a fortune, what unspeakable 
bitterness would be awakened in the hearts of Mr. 
Snarling and Miss Limejuice ! If their malignant 
glances could lame your horses as you drive by them 
with that fine new pair, the horses would limp home 
with great difficulty. And if their eyes could set 
your grand house on fire, immediately on the new 
furniture going in, a heavy loss would fall either 
upon you or the Insurance Company. 

But this will not do. As you read these lines, 
my friend, you picture yourself as the person who 
attains the eminence and succeeds to the fortune : 
and you picture Miss Limejuice and Mr. Snarling as 
two of your neighbours. But Avhat I desire is, that 
you should change the case: imagine your friend 
Smith preferred before you : and consider whether 
there would not be something of the Snarling ten- 
dency in yourself. Of course, you would not suffer 
it to manifest itself: but it is there, and needs to 
be put down. And it needs to be put down more 
than once. You will now and then be vexed 
and mortified to find that, after fancying you 
had quite made up your mind to certain facts, 
you are far from really having done so. Well, you 
must just try again. You must look for help where 
it is always to be found. And in the long run you 
will succeed. It will be painful, after you fancied 



2 24 Concerning Old Enemies. 

you had weeded out self-conceit and envy from 
your nature, to find yourself some day talking in a 
bitter and ill-set way about some man or some 
woman whose real offence is merely having been 
more prosperous than yourself You thought you 
had got beyond that. But it is all for your good 
to be reminded that the old root of bitterness is 
there yet : that you are never done with it : that 
you must be always cutting it down. A gardener 
might as justly suppose that because he has mown 
down the grass of a lawn very closely to-day, the 
grass will never grow up and need mowing again, 
as we fancy that because we have unsparingly put 
down an evil tendency within us, we shall have no 
more trouble with it. 

Did nature give you, my friend, or education 
develope in you, a power of saying or writing severe 
things, which might stick into people as the little 
darts stick into the bull at a Spanish bull-fight } I 
believe that there are few persons who might not, 
if their heart would let them, acquire the faculty of 
producing disagreeable things, expressed with more 
or less of neatness and felicity. And in the case of 
the rare man here and there, who says his ill-set 
saying with epigrammatic point, like the touch of a 
rapier, the ill-setness may be excused, because the 
thing is so gracefully said. We would not wish 
that tigers should be exterminated : but it is to be 
desired that they should be very few. Let there be 



Concernmg Old Enemies. 225 

spared a specimen, here and there, of the graceful, 
agile, ferocious savage. But you, my reader, were 
no great hand at epigrams, though you were ready 
enough with your ill-set remark : and after some 
experience, you concluded that there is something 
better in this world than to say things, however 
cleverly, that are intended to give pain. And so 
you determined to cut that off, and to go upon 
the kindly tack : to say a good and cheering word 
whenever you had the opportunity : to be ready 
with a charitable interpretation of what people do : 
and never to utter or to write a word that could vex 
a fellow-creature, who (you may be sure) has quite 
enough to vex him without your adding anything. 
Perhaps you did all this : rather overdoing the 
thing : ill-set people are apt to overdo the thing 
when they go in for kindliness and geniality. But 
some day, having met some little offence, the elec- 
tricity that had been storing up during that season 
of repression, burst out in a flash of what may, by 
a strong figure, be called forked lightning : the old 
enemyhadgot the mastery again. And indeedahasty 
temper, founding as it does mainly on irritability of 
the nervous system, is never quite got over. It may 
be much aggravated by yielding to it : and much 
abated by constant restraint : but unless the beast 
be perpetually seen to, it is sure to be bursting out 
now and then. Socrates, you remember, said that 
his temper was naturally hasty and bad : but that 

Q 



2 26 Concerning Old Enemies. 

philosophy had cured him. I believe it needs 
something much more efficacious than any human 
philosophy to work such a cure. No doubt, you 
may diligently train yourself to see what is to be 
said in excuse of the offences given you by your 
fellow-creatures; and to look at the case as it 
appears from their point of view. This will help. 
But though ill-temper, left to its natural growth, 
will grow always worse, there is a point at which it 
has been found to mend. When the nervous system 
grows less sensitive through age, hastiness of 
temper sometimes goes. The old enemy is weak- 
ened : the beast has been (so to speak) hamstrung. 
You will be told that the thing which mainly im- 
pressed persons who saw the great Duke of 
Wellington in the last months of his life, was what 
a mild gentle old man he was. Of course, every 
one knows that he was not always so. The days 
were, when his temper was hot and hasty enough. 
And thus thinking of physical influence, let us 
remember that what is vulgarly called nervousness 
is an enemy which many men know to their cost is 
not to be got over. The firmest assurance that you 
have done a thing many times, and so should be 
able to do it once more, may not suffice to enable 
you to look forward to doing it without a vague 
tremor and apprehension. There are human beings, 
all whose work is done without any very great 
nervous strain : there are others in whose vocation 



Concerning Old Enemies. 227 

there come many times that put their whole nature 
upon the stretch. And these times test a man. 
You know a horse may be quite lame, while yet it 
does not appear in walking. Trot the creature 
smartly : and the lameness becomes manifest. In 
like manner a man may be nervous, particular, 
crotchety, superstitious : while yet this may not 
appear till you trot him sharply : put him at some 
work that must be done with the full stretch of his 
powers. And then you will see that he has got 
little odd ways of his own. I do not know what is 
the sensation of going into battle, and finding one- 
self under fire : but short of that, I think the 
greatest strain to which a human being is usually 
subjected, is that of the preacher. A little while 
ago, I was talking with a distinguished clergyman : 
and being desirous of comparing his experience with 
that of his juniors, I asked him, 

1. Whether, in walking to church on Sunday to 
preach, he did not always walk on the same side of 
the street 1 Whether he w^ould not feel uncomfort- 
able, and as if something were going wrong, if he 
made any change } 

2. Whether when waiting in the vestry, the 
minute or two before the beadle should come to 
precede him into church, he did not always stand 
on the same spot t Whether it would not put him 
out of gear, to vary from that } 

My eminent friend answered all these questions 

<t2 



2 28 Concerning Old Enemies. 

in the affirmative. Of course there are a great 
many men to whom I should no more have thought 
of proposing such questions than I should think 
of proposing them to a rhinoceros. Such men, 
probably, have no little ways : and if they had, 
they would not admit that they had. But my 
friend is so very able a man, and so very sincere a 
man, that he had no reason to be afraid of anyone 
thinking him little, though he acknowledged to 
having his little fancies. And indeed, when you 
come to know people well, you will find that they 
have all ways that are quite analogous to Johnson's 
touching the tops of all the posts as he walked 
London streets. They would not exactly say, that 
they are afraid of anything happening to them if 
they deviated from the old track : but they think 
it just as well to keep on the safe side, by not 
deviating from it. 

Possibly there was a period in your life, in which 
you had no objection to get into controversies upon 
political or religious subjects with other men : 
which controversies gradually grew angry : and 
probably ended in mutual abuse, but assuredly not 
in conviction. But having remarked. In the case of 
other controversialists, what fools they ^invariably 
made of themselves : having remarked their ludi- 
crous exaggeration of the importance of their 
dispute, and the malice and disingenuousness with 
which they carried on their debate (more especially 



Concerning Old Enemies. 229 

If they were clergymen) : having remarked, in brief, 
how very little a controversialist ever looks like a 
Christian : you turned, in loathing, from the whole 
thing, and resolved that you would never get into 
a controversy, public or private, with any mortal, 
upon any subject, any more. Stick to that resolu- 
tion, my friend ; it is a good one. But you will 
occasionally be tempted to break it. Whenever the 
old enemy assails you, just think what a dema- 
gogue or agitator, political or religious, looks like 
in the eyes of all sensible and honest men ! 

Perhaps you had a tendency to be suspicious ; 
and you have broken yourself of it. Perhaps your 
temptation was to be easily worried by little cross- 
accidents, and to get needlessly excited. Perhaps 
your temptation was to laziness : to putting off duty 
till to-morrow : to untidiness : to moral cowardice. 
Whatever it was, my friend, never think yourself 
so cured of an evil habit, that you may cease to 
mow it down. If Demosthenes had left off attend- 
ing to his speaking, he would have relapsed into his 
old evil ways. If St. Paul, after having learned to 
be content, had ceased to see to that, he would 
gradually have grown a grumbler. 

I am going to close this little procession of old 
enemies which has passed before our eyes, by 
naming a large and general one. It is Folly. My 
friend, if you have attained to any measure of com- 
mon sense now, you know what a tremendous fool 



230 Concerning Old Enemies. 

you were once. If you do not know that, then you 
are a fool still. Ah, reader, wise and good, you 
know all the weakness, the silliness, the absurd 
fancies and dreams, that have been yours. I pre- 
sume that you are ready to give up a great part of 
your earlier life : you have not a word to say for it. 
All your desire is that it should in charity be for- 
gotten. But surely you will not now make a fool 
of yourself any more. There shall be no more now 
of the hasty talking, the vapouring about your own 
importance, the idiotic sayings and doings you wish 
you could bury in Lethe : and which you may be 
very sure certain of your kind friends carefully 
remember and occasionally recall. But now and 
then the logic of facts will convince you that the 
old enemy is not quite annihilated yet ; and you 
say something you regret the moment it is uttered. 
You do something which indicates that you have 
lost your head for the time. 

Let it be said, in conclusion, as the upshot of the 
whole matter, that the wise man will never think 
he is safe till he has reached a certain Place where 
no enemy can assail him more. I beg my friend 
Mr. Snarling to take notice, that I do not pretend 
to have pointed out in these pages the worst of 
those old enemies that get up again and run at us 
after they had been knocked on the head once, and 
more than once. If this had been a sermon, I 
should have given you a very different catalogue ; 



Concerning Old E^iemies. 231 

and one that would have awakened more serious 
thoughts. Not but that those which have been 
named are well worth thinking of. The day will 
never come, in this world, on which it will be safe 
for us to sit down in perfect security; and to say 
to ourselves. Now we need keep no watch ; we may 
(in a moral sense) draw the charge from our revol- 
ver because it will not be needed ; we may fall 
asleep and nothing will meddle with us the while. 
For all around us, my friend, are the old enemies 
of our souls and our salvation : some aiming at 
nothing more than to make us disagreeable and 
repulsive, petty and jealous; others aiming at 
nothing less than to make us unfit for the only 
Home where we can know perfect rest and peace : 
some stealing upon us more stealthily, silently, 
fatally, than ever the Indian crept through the 
darkness of night upon the traveller nodding over 
his watch-fire : some coming down upon us, strong 
and sudden as the tiger's agile spring. Well we 
know what to do : we must watch and pray. And 
the time will come at length, when the pack of 
wolves shall be lashed off for ever : when the evil 
within us shall be killed outright, and beyond all 
reviving : and when the evil around us shall be 
gone. 



CHAPTER XL 
AT THE CASTLE: 

WITH SOME THOUGHTS ON MICHAEL SCOTT S 
FAMILIAR SPIRIT 




OT on a study table in a back parlour in 
a great city, shall these little blue pages 
be covered with written characters. Every 
word shall be written in the open air. The page 
shall be lighted by sunshine that comes through no 
glass ; but which is tempered by coming through 
masses of green leaves. And this essay is not to 
be composed : not to be screwed out, to use the 
figure of Mr. Thackeray : not to be pumped out, 
to use the figure of Festiis. It shall grow without 
an effort. When any thought occurs, the pencil 
shall note it down. No thought shall be hurried in 
its coming. 

You know how after a good many months of 
constant work, with the neck always at the collar, 
you grow wearied, and easily worried. Little things 
become burdensome : and the best of work is felt 



Michael Scott's Familiar Spirit. 233 

as a task. You cannot reason yourself out of that : 
ten days' rest is the thing that will do it. Be thank- 
ful if then you can have such a season of quiet in 
as green and shady a nook of country as mortal 
eyes could wish to see : in a nook like this, amid 
green grass and green trees, and the wild flowers of 
the early summer. For this is little more than mid- 
way in the pleasant month of May. 

It is a very warm, sunshiny morning. This is a 
little open glade of rich grass, lighted up with dai- 
sies and buttercups. The little glade is surrounded 
by large forest trees : under the trees there is a 
blaze of primroses and wild hyacinths. A soft west 
wind, laden with the fragrance of lilac and apple 
blossoms, wakes the gentlest of sounds (in a more 
expressive language than ours it would have been 
called siisurrus) in the topmost branches, gently 
swaying to and fro. The swaying branches cast a 
flecked and dancing shadow on the grass below. 
Midway the little glade is beyond the shadow : and 
there the grass, in the sunbeams, has a tinge of gold. 
A river runs by, with a ceaseless murmur over the 
warm stones. Look to the right hand : and there, 
over the trees, two hundred yards off, you may see 
a gray and red tower motionless above the waving 
branches : and lower down, hardly surmounting the 
wood, a stretch of massive wall, with huge but- 
tresses. Tower and wall crown a lofty knoll, which 
the river encircles, making it a peninsula. Wall- 



2 34 At the Castle: 



flower grows in the crannies : a little wild apple- 
tree, covered with white blossoms, crowns a detached 
fragment of a ruined gateway : sweetbrier grows 
at the base of the ancient walls : ivy and honey- 
suckle climb up them : and where great fragments 
of fallen wall testify to the excellence of the mortar 
of the eleventh century, wild roses have rooted 
themselves in masses, which are now only green. 
That is The Castle : all that can be seen of it 
from this point. There is more to be said of it 
hereafter. Hard by this spot, two little children 
are sitting on the grass, to whom some one is read- 
ing a story. 

The wise man will never weary of looking at 
green grass and green trees. It is an unspeakable 
refreshment to the eye and the mind : and the daily 
pressure of occupation cannot touch one here. One 
wonders that human beings who always live amid 
such scenery do not look more like it. But some 
people are utterly unimpressionable by the influ- 
ences of outward scenery. You may know men 
who have lived for many years where Nature has 
done her best with wood and rock and river : and 
even when you become well acquainted with them, 
you cannot discover the faintest trace in their talk 
or in their feeling of the mightily powerful touch 
(as it would be to many) which has been unceas- 
ingly laid upon them through all that time. Or 
you may have beheld a vacuous person at a pic-nic 



Michael Scotfs Familiar Spirit. 235 

party, who amid traces of God's handiwork that 
should make men hold their breath, does but pass 
from the occupation of fatuously flirting with a 
young woman like himself, to furiously abusing the 
servants for not sufficiently cooling the wine. A 
great many of the highly respectable people, we 
all know, are entirely in the case of the hero of 
that exquisite poem of Wordsworth's, which Jeffrey 
never could bring himself to like. 

But Nature ne'er could find her way 
Into the heart of Peter Bell. 

In vain, through every changing year, 

Did Nature lead him as before : 
A primrose by a river's brim, 
A yellow primrose was to him, 

And it was nothing more. 

A human being ought to be very thankful if his 
disposition be such that he heartily enjoys green 
grass and green trees. For there are clever men 
who do not : in a little while I shall tell you of an 
extraordinary and anomalous taste expressed on 
that subject by one of the cleverest men I know. 
If a man has a thousand a year, and his next neigh- 
bour five hundred : and if the man with five hun- 
dred makes his income go just as far as the larger 
one (and an approximation to doing so may be 
made by good management), it is plain that these 
two mortals are, in respect of income, on the same 
precise footing. The poorer man gets so much 



236 At the Castle : 



more enjoyment out of his yearly revenue, as makes 
up for the fact that the richer man's revenue is twice 
as great. 

There is a like compensation provided for the lack 
of material advantages in the case of many men, 
through their intense appreciation of the beauty of 
natural scenery, and of very simple things. A rich 
man may possess the acres, with their yearly rental : 
a poor man, such as a poet, a professor, a school- 
master, a clergyman or the like, may possess the 
landscape which these acres make up, to the utter 
exclusion of the landed proprietor. Perhaps, friendly 
reader, God has not given you the earthly possessions 
which it has pleased Him to give to some whom you 
know: but He may have given you abundant re- 
compense, by giving you the power of getting more 
enjoyment out of little things than many other 
men. You live in a little cottage, and your neigh- 
bour in a grand castle : you have a small collection 
of books, and your neighbour a great one of fine 
editions in sumptuous bindings and in carved oak 
cases : yet you may have so great delight in your 
snug house, and your familiar volumes, that in re- 
gard of actual enjoyment, you may be the more 
enviable man. A green field with a large oak in 
the middle : a hedge of blossoming hawthorn : a 
thatched cottage under a great maple : twenty 
square yards of velvety turf: how really happy 
such things can make some simple folk ! 



Michael Scotfs Familiar Spirit. 237 

Of course it occurs to one that the same people 
who get more enjoyment out of Httle pleasures, 
will get more suffering out of anything painful. 
Because your tongue is more sensitive than the 
palm of your hand, it is aware of the flavour of a 
pine-apple which your palm would ignore : but it is 
also liable to know the taste of assafoetida, of which 
your palm v/ould be unconscious. The supersensi- 
tive nervous system is finely strung to discern pain 
as well as pleasure. No one knows, but the over- 
particular person, what a pure misery it is to go 
into an untidy room, if it be your own. There are 
people who suffer as much in having a tooth filed, 
as others in losing a limb. A Frenchman, some 
years since, committed suicide : leaving a written 
paper to say he had done so because life was ren- 
dered unendurable through his being so much bitten 
by fleas. This is not a thing to smile at. That 
poor man, before his reason was upset, had proba- 
bly endured torments of which those around had 
not the faintest idea. I have heard a good man 
praised for the patience with which he bore daily 
for weeks the surgeon's dressing of a very severe 
wound. The good man was thought heroic. I 
knew him well enough to be sure that the fact was 
that his nature was dull and slow. He did not 
suffer as average men would have suffered under 
that infliction. There are human beings in touch- 
ing whose moral nature you feel you are touching 



238 At the Castle : 

the impenetrable skin of the hippopotamus. There 
are human beings in touching whose moral nature 
you feel you are touching the bare tip of a nerve. 
Eager, anxious men are prone to envy imper- 
turbable and slow-moving men. My friend Smith, 
who is of an eager nature, tells me he looks with 
a feeling a few degrees short of veneration on 
a massive-minded and immovable being, who in 
telling a story makes such long pauses at the end 
of each sentence that you fancy the story done. 
Then poor Smith breaks in hastily with some- 
thing he wants to say: but the massive-minded 
man, not noticing him, continues his parable till 
he pauses again at the end of another sentence. 
And Smith is made to feel as though he were very 
young. 

I have said that likings vary in regard to such 
matters as the enjoyment of this scene. Oh this 
green grass, rich, unutterably green, with the but- 
tercups and daisies, with the yellow broom and the 
wild bees, and the environment of bright leafy trees 
that inclose you round : to think that there are peo- 
ple who do not care for you ! It was but yesterday, 
in a street of a famous and beautiful city, I met my 
friend Mr. Keene. Keene is a warm-hearted, mag- 
nanimous, unselfish, brave, out-spoken human being: 
as fine a fellow as is numbered among the clergy of 
either side of the Tweed. Besides these things, he 



Michael Scott's Familiar Spirit. 239 

is an admirable debater : fluent, ready, eloquent, 
hearty, fully persuaded that he is right and that his 
opponents are invariably wrong ; and not without 
some measure of smartness and sharpness in ex- 
pression. Keene approached me with a radiant 
face ; the result partly of inherent good nature, and 
partly of a very hot summer day. He had come 
to the city to take part in the debates of the great 
ecclesiastical council of a northern country. I was 
coming to this place. He was entering the city, in 
fact, for many days of deliberation and debate : I 
was departing from it, for certain days of rest and 
recreation. I could not refrain from displaying 
some measure of exultation at the contrast between 
our respective circumstances. I shall be lying to- 
morrow (I said) on green grass under green trees : 
while you will be existing (the word used indeed 
was stewing) in that crowded building, with its 
feverish atmosphere highly charged with carbonic 
acid gas. To these words Keene replied, with sim- 
ple earnestness : I shall be quite happy there : I 
don't care a straw for green grass and green leaves ! 
Such was the sentiment of that eminent man. I 
pity him sincerely ! 

Here I paused : and thought for a little of the 
great ecclesiastical council, and of lesser ecclesias- 
tical councils. And the following reflection sug 
gested itself. 



240 At the Castle: 



, Our good principles are too often like Don 
Quixote's helmet. We arrive at them in leisure, in 
cool blood, with an unexcited brain, which is com- 
monly called a clear head. Then in actual life, 
they too commonly fail at the first real trial. Don 
Quixote made up his helmet carefully with a vizor 
of pasteboard. Then to ascertain whether it was 
strong enough, he dealt it a blow with his sword. 
Thereupon it went to pieces. 

In like manner, in our better and more thoughtful 
hours, we resolve to be patient, forgiving, charitable, 
kind-spoken, unsuspicious, — in short. Christian, for 
that includes all. And the first time we are irritated, 
we fail. We grow very angry at some small offence : 
we speak harshly, we act unfairly. I have heard a 
really good man preach. Afterwards I heard him 
speak in a lesser ecclesiastical council. He preached 
(so far as the sentiments expressed went) like an 
angel. He argued like just the reverse. 

Ah, we make up our helmets with pasteboard. 
We resolve that henceforth we shall act on the 
rnost noble principles. And the helmets look very 
well so long as they are not put to the test. 
We fancy ourselves charitable, forgiving. Christian 
people, so long as we are not tried. A stroke with 
a sword, and the helmet goes to tatters. An attack 
on us : a reflection on us : a hint that we ever did 
wrong: and oh the wretched outburst of wrath, 
bitterness, unfairness, malignity ! 



Michael Scot fs Familiar Spirit. 241 

Of course, the best of men, as it has been said, 
are but men at the best. Let us be humble. Let 
there be no vain self-confidence. And especially, 
let us, entering- on every scene that can possibly try 
us (and when do we escape from such a scene T) 
earnestly ask the guidance of that Blessed Spirit of 
Whom is every good feeling and purpose in us; 
and without Whom our best resolutions will snap 
like reeds just when they are needed most to stand 
firm. 

There is more to be said about the Castle. It is 
not a castle to which you go, that you may enjoy 
the society of dukes and other nobles, such as form 
the daily associates of the working clergy. By the 
payment of a moderate weekly stipend, this castle 
may become yours. The castle is in ruins : but a 
little corner, amid the great masses of crumbling 
stones which were placed here by strong hands 
dead for eight hundred years, has been patched up 
so as to make an unpretending little dwelling : and 
there you may find the wainscoted rooms, the 
quaint panelled ceilings of mingled timber and 
plaster, the winding turret stairs, the many secret 
doors, of past centuries. The castle stands on a 
lofty promontory of no great extent, which a little 
river encircles on two sides, and which a deep ravine 
cuts off from the surrounding country on the other 
two sides. You approach the castle over an arch 

R 



242 At the Castle: 



of seventy feet in height : which spans the ravine. 
In former days it was a drawbridge. The bridge 
runs out of the inner court of the castle : midway 
in its length it turns off at almost a right angle, till 
it joins the bank on the other side of the ravine. 
That little bridge makes a charming place to walk 
on : and it is a great deal longer than any quarter- 
deck. It is all grown over with masses of ancient 
ivy: the fragrance of a sweetbrier hedge in the 
castle court pervades it at present : you look down 
from it upon a deep glen, through which the little 
river flows. The tops of the tall trees are far 
beneath you : there are various plane-trees with 
their thick leaves. Wherever you look, it is one 
mass of rich foliage. Trees fill up the ravine : trees 
clothe the steep bank on the other side of the river: 
trees have rooted themselves in wonderful spots in 
the old walls: trees clothe the ascent that leads 
from the castle to that little summit near, crowned 
with one of the loveliest creations of the Gothic 
architect's skill. That is the chancel of a large 
church, of which only the chancel was ever built : 
and if you would behold a little chapel of inex- 
pressible perfection and beauty ; if you would dis- 
cern the traces of the faithful and loving toil of 
men who have been for hundreds of years in their 
graves ; if you would look upon ancient stones that 
seem as if they had grown and blossomed like a 
tree: then find out where that chapel is, and go 
and see it. 



Michael Scotfs Familiar Spirit. 243 

But you pass over the bridge; and under a ruined 
gateway, where part of a broken arch hangs over 
the passer-by, you enter the court. On the right 
hand, ruined walls of vast thickness. The Hke on 
the left hand : but midway, there is the little portion 
that is habitable. Enter : pass into a pretty large 
wainscoted parlour: look out of the windows on 
the further side. You are a hundred feet above the 
garden below. For on that side, there is below you 
story after story of low-browed chambers, arched 
in massive stone; and lower still, the castle wall 
rises from the top of a precipice of perpendicular 
rock. On the further side from the river, the cham- 
bers are hewn out of the living stone. What a view 
from the window of that parlour, first mentioned ! 
Beneath, the garden, bright now with blossoming 
apple-trees : bounded by the river : and beyond the 
river, a bank of wood, three hundred feet in height. 
A little window in a corner looks down the course 
of the stream : there is a deep dell of wood, one 
thick luxuriance of foliage : with here and there the 
gleam of the flowing water. 

This is our place of rest. Add to all that has 
been said an inexpressible sense of a pervading 
quiet. 

Do you find, when you come to a place where 
you are to have a brief holiday, a tendency to look 
back on the work you have been doing; and to 



244 At the CasUe 



estimate what it has come to after all ? And have 
you found, even after many months of grinding as 
hard as you could, that it was mortifying to see 
how little was the permanent result ? Such seems to 
be the effect of looking back on work. One thinks 
of a case, parallel to the present feeling. There was 
Jacob, looking back on a long life : on a hundred 
and twenty years: and saying, sincerely, that his 
days had been few and evil. Now, in a blink of 
rest, my friend, look back on the results you have 
accomplished in those months of hard work. You 
thought them many and good at the time: now, 
they seem to be no better than few and evil. It is 
humiliating to think how little permanent result is 
got by a working day. To bring things to book, 
to actually count and weigh them, always makes 
them look less. You may remember a calculation 
made by the elder Disraeli, as to the amount of 
matter a man could read in a lifetime. It is very 
much less than you would have thought : perhaps 
one-tenth of what an ordinary person would guess. 
Thackeray, in his days of matured and practised 
power, thought it a good day's work to write six of 
the little pages of Esmond. A distinguished and 
experienced author told me that he esteemed three 
pages of the Quarterly Review a good day's work. 
Some men judge a sermon, which can be given in 
little more than half an hour, a sufficient result of 
the almost constant thought of a week. Six little 



Michael Scotfs Familiar Spirit. 245 

pages, as the sole abiding result of a day on which 
the sun rose and set, and the clock went the round 
of the four-and-twenty hours : on which you took 
your bath, and your breakfast, and read your news- 
paper, and in short went through the round of em- 
ployments which make your habitude of being : six 
pages : skimmed by the reader in five minutes ! 
The truth is, that a great part of our energy goes 
just to bear the burden of the day, to do the work 
of the time : and we have only the little surplus of 
abiding possession. The way to keep ourselves 
from getting mortified and disheartened, when we 
look back on the remaining result of all our work, 
is to remember that we are not here merely to 
work : merely to produce that which shall be an 
abiding memorial of us. It is well if all we do and 
bear is forming our nature and character into some- 
thing which we can willingly take with us when we 
go away from this life. 

This morning, after breakfast, I was sitting on 
the parapet of the bridge already mentioned, looking 
down upon the tops of two plane-trees, and feeling 
a great deal the better for the sight. I believe it 
does good to an ordinary mortal to look down on 
the top of a large tree, and see the branches gently 
waving about. Little outward phenomena have a 
wonderful effect in soothing and refreshing the 
mind. Some men say the sight and sound of the 



246 At the Castle 



sea calms and cheers them. You know how when 
a certain old prophet was beaten and despairing, 
the All- Wise thought it would be good for him to 
behold certain sublime manifestations of the power 
of the Almighty. We cannot explain the rationale 
of the process : but these things do us good. A 
wise and good and most laborious man told me 
that when he feels overworked and desponding, he 
flies away to Chamouni and looks at Mont Blanc : 
and in a few days he is set right. It was not a 
fanciful man who said that there is scenery in this 
world that would soothe even remorse. And for an 
ordinary person, not a great genius and not a great 
ruffian, give us a lofty bridge whence you may look 
down upon a great plane-tree. 

All this, however, is a deviation. Sitting on the 
bridge and enjoying the scene, this thought arose. 
Greatly as one enjoys and delights in this, what 
would the feeling be if one were authoritatively 
commanded to remain in this beautiful place, doing 
nothing, for a month .? And one could not but con- 
fess that the feeling would not be pleasant. The 
things you enjoy most intensely, you enjoy for but 
a short time : then you are satiated. When parched 
with thirst, what so delightful as the first draught 
of fair water } But if you were compelled to drink 
a fourth and fifth tumbler, the water would become 
positively nauseous. So is it with rest. You enjoy 
it keenly for a little while : but constrained idleness, 



Michael ScoWs Familiar Spirit. 247 

-being prolonged, would make you miserable. Ten 
days here are delightful: then back, with fresh 
appetite and vigour, to the dear work. But a month 
here, thus early in the year, would be a fearful in- 
fliction. You have not earned the Autumn holidays 
as yet. 

It is in human nature, that when you feel the 
pressure of anything painfully, you fancy that the 
opposite thing would set you right. When you are 
extremely busy, and distracted by a host of things 
demanding thought, you think that pure idleness 
would be pleasant. So, in boyhood, on a burning 
summer day, you thought it would be delicious to 
feel cold. You went to bathe in the sea : and you 
found it a great deal too cold. 

Charles Lamb, for a great part of his life, was 
kept very busy, at uncongenial work. Oftentimes, 
through those irksome hours, he thought how plea- 
sant it would be to be set free from that work for 
ever. So he said that if he had a son, the son should 
be called Nothing to do; and he should do 
nothing. Of course, Elia spoke only half-seriously. 
We know what he meant. But, in sober earnest, we 
can all see that Nothing to do would have been 
a miserable as well as a wicked man. He would 
assuredly have grown a bad fellow. And he would 
just as surely have been a wretched being. 

Every one knows the story of Michael Scott and 



248 At the Castle 



his Familiar Spirit. Of late I have begun to under- 
stand the meaning of that story. 

Michael Scott, it is recorded, had a Familiar 
Spirit under his charge. We do not know how 
Michael Scott first got possession of that Spirit. 
Probably he raised it and then could not get rid of 
it : like the man who begged Dr. Log to propose a 
toast, and then Dr. Log spoke for three-quarters 
of an hour. . Michael Scott had to provide employ- 
ment for that being, on pain of being torn in pieces. 
Michael gave the Spirit very difficult things to do. 
They were done with terrible ease and rapidity. 
The three peaks of the Eildon Hills were formed in 
a single night. A weir was built across the Tweed 
in a like time. Michael Scott was in a terrible state. 
In these days, he would probably have desired the 
Spirit to make and lay the Atlantic Telegraph 
Cable. But a happy thought struck him. He bade 
his Familiar make a rope of sea-sand. Of course, 
this provided unlimited occupation. The thing 
could never be finished. And the wizard was all 
right. 

These things are an allegory. Michael Scotf s 
Familiar Spirit is your own mind, my friend. Your 
own mind demands that you find it occupation: 
and if you do not, it will make you miserable. It 
is an awful thing to have nothing to do. The mill 
within you demands grist to grind : and if you give 
it none, it still grinds on, as Luther said : but it is 



Michael Scotfs Familiar Spirit. 249 

itself it grinds and wears away. My friend Smith, 
having overworked his eyes at College, was once 
forbid to read or write for eighteen months. It was 
a horrible penance at first. But he devised ways of 
giving the machine work : and during that period 
of enforced idleness, he acquired the power of con- 
nected thinking without writing down each succes- 
sive thought. Few people have that power. One 
of the rarest of all acquirements is the faculty of 
profitable meditation. Most human beings, when 
they fancy they are meditating, are in fact doing 
nothing at all ; and thinking of nothing. 

You will remember what was once said by a 
lively French writer : that we commonly think of 
idleness as one of the beatitudes of Heaven ; while 
we ought rather to think of it as one of the miseries 
of Hell. It was an extreme way which that writer 
took of testifying to the tormenting power of 
Michael Scott's Familiar Spirit. 

And one evil in this matter is, that it is just the 
men who lead the most active and useful lives, who 
are making Michael Scott's Spirit most insatiable. 
You give it abundance to do : and so when work is 
cut off from it, it becomes rampageous. You lose 
the power of sitting still and doing nothing. You 
find it inexpressibly irksome to travel by railway 
for even half an hour, with nothing to read. For 
the most handy way of pacifying the Spirit is to 
give it something to read. People tell you how 



250 At the Castle : 



disgusting it was when they had to wait for three- 
quarters of an hour for the train at some Httle 
country railway station. Michael Scott's Spirit was 
worrying and tormenting them, being kept without 
employment for that time. You know to what 
shifts people will have recourse, rather than have 
the Familiar Spirit coming and tormenting them. 
To give grist to the mill, to provide the Familiar 
Spirit with something to do, on a railway journey 
of twelve hours, they will read all the advertisements 
in their newspaper: they will go back a second 
and a third time over all the news : they will even 
diligently peruse the leading article of the Little 
Pedlington Gazette. They read the advertisements 
in Bradshaw. They try to make out, from that 
publication, how to reach, by many corresponding 
trains, some little cross-country place to which they 
never intend to go. Anything rather than be idle. 
Anything rather than lean back, quite devoid of 
occupation : and feel the Familiar Spirit worrying 
away within, as Prometheus felt the vulture at his 
liver. When I hear a young fellow say of some 
country place where he has been spending some 
time, that it is a horribly slow place, that it is the 
deadest place on earth, I am aware that he did not 
find occupation there for Michael Scott's Familiar 
Spirit. 

One looks with interest at people in whose case 
that Spirit seems to have been lulled into torpidity : 



Michael Scotfs Familiar Spirit. 251 

has been brought to what a practical philosopher 
called a dormouse state. I read last night in a book 
how somebody ' leant his cheek on his hand and 
gazed abstractedly into the fire.' One who has 
trained the Familiar Spirit to an insatiable appetite 
for work, can hardly believe such a thing possible. 
You may remember a picture in a volume of the 
illustrated edition of the Waverley Novels, which 
represents a plump old abbot, sitting satisfied in a 
large chair, with the light of the fire on his face : 
doing nothing, thinking of nothing : and quite tran- 
quil and content. One sometimes thinks, Would 
we could do the like ! That fat stupid old abbot 
had led so idle a life, that the muscular power of 
the Familiar Spirit was abated :' and its craving for 
work gone. 

When you are wearied with long work, my reader, 
I wish you may have a place like this to which to 
come and rest. How good and pleasant it is for a 
little while ! Your cares and burdens fall off from 
you. How insignificant many things look to one, 
sitting on this green grass, or looking over this 
bridge down into the green dell, that worried one 
in the midst of duty ! If you were out in a hurri- 
cane at sea, and your boat got at last into a little 
sheltered cove, you w^ould be glad and thankful. 
But only for a short time. In a little, you would 
be weary of staying there. We are so made that 
we cannot for any length of time remain quiescent 



252 At the Castle : 



and do nothing. And we cannot live on the past. 
The FamiHar Spirit will not chew the cud, so to 
speak : you must give him fresh provender to grind. 
Perhaps there have been days in your life which 
were so busy with hard work, so alive with what to 
you were great interests, so happy with a bewilder- 
ing bliss, that you fancied you would be able to 
look back on them and to live in them all your life, 
and they would be a possession for ever. Not so. 
It is the present on which we must live. You can 
no more satisfy Michael Scott's Spirit with the 
remembrance of former occupations and enjoy- 
ments, than you can allay your present hunger with 
the remembrance of beef-steaks brought you by 
the plump head-waiter at '■ The Cock,' half-a-dozen 
years ago. Each day must bring its work : or the 
Spirit will be at you and stick pins into you. 

A power of falling asleep, enables one to evade 
the Spirit. At night, going to bed, looking for a 
sleepless night, how many a man has said. Oh for 
forgetfulness ! When you have escaped into that 
realm, the Spirit can trouble you no more. You 
know the wish which Hood puts on the lips of 
Eugene Aram, tortured by an unendurable recol- 
lection : that he could shut his mind and clasp it 
with a clasp, as he could close his book and clasp it. 
Few men are more to be envied than those who 
have this power. Napoleon had it. "So had the 
Duke of Wellington. At any moment either of 



Michael Scotfs Familiar Spirit. 253 

these men could escape into a region where they 
were entirely free from the pressure of those 
anxieties which weighed them down while awake. 
Once the Duke with his aide-de-camp came gallop- 
ing up to a point of the British lines whence an 
attack was to be made. He was told the guns 
would not be ready to open for two hours. '■ Then/ 
said he, ' we had better have a sleep.' He sat down 
in a trench, leant his back against its side, and was 
fast asleep in a minute. That great man could 
at any time escape from Michael Scott's Spirit : 
could get into a country where the Spirit could not 
follow him. For in dreamless sleep you escape 
from yourself 

I have been told that there is another means of 
lulling that insatiable being into a state in which 
it ceases to be troublesome and importunate. It is 
tobacco. Some men say that the smoking of that 
fragrant weed soothes them into a perfect calm, in 
which they are pleasurably conscious of existing, 
but have no wish to do anything. Let me confess, 
notwithstanding, that I esteem smoking as one of 
the most offensive and selfish of the lesser sins. 
When I see smoke pouring out of the window of a 
railway carriage not specially allotted to smokers, 
I go no farther for evidence that that carriage is 
occupied by selfish snobs. 

Young children have Michael Scott's Familiar 
Spirit to find employment for, just as much as their 



254 ^i ihe Castle: 



seniors. Who does not yet remember the horrible 
feeling which you expressed when a child by saying 
you had nothing to do ? I have just heard a little 
thing say to his mother, ' Read me a story to make 
the time pass quick.' That was his way of saying 
* to pacify the Familiar Spirit.* And we talk of 
killing Time, as though he were an enemy to be 
reduced to helplessness. There is an offensive 
phrase which sets all the idea more distinctly. There 
are silly fellows who ask you what o'clock it is by 
saying ' How goes the enemy V This phrase indeed 
suggests thoughts too solemn and awful for this 
page. Let me ask, in a word, if Time be such, how 
about Eternity } But in every such case as those 
named, the enemy is not Time. It is Michael 
Scott's Familiar Spirit, demanding occupation. 
How fast Time goes, when the Spirit is pleasantly 
or laboriously employed ! When people talk of 
killing Time, they mean knocking that strange 
being on the head, so to speak : stunning it for the 
hour. That may be done : but it is soon up again, 
importunate as ever. 

I suppose, my reader, that you can remember 
times in which the face you loved best looked its 
sweetest ; and tones, pleasanter than all the rest, of 
the voice that was always pleasantest to hear : 
thoughtful looks of the little child you seek in vain 
in the man in whom you lost it ; and smiles of the 



Michael ScoWs Familiar Spirit. 255 

little child that died. Touched as with the light of 
eternity, these things stand forth amid the years of 
past time : they are as the mountain tops rising over 
the mists of oblivion: they are the possessions which 
will never pass your remembrance till you cease to 
remember at all. And you know that Nature too 
has her moments of special transfiguration : times 
when she looks so fair and sweet that you are com- 
pelled to think that she would do well enough (for 
all the thorns and thistles of the Fall), if you could 
but get quit of the ever-intruding blight of Sin and 
Sorrow. Such a season is this bright morning: 
with its sunshine that seems to us (in our ignorance) 
fair and joyous enough for that Place where there is 
no night : with its leaves green and living (would 
they but last) as we can picture of the Tree of Life : 
with its cheerful quiet that is a little foretaste of 
the perfect Rest which shall last for ever. It is 
very nearly time to go back to work : but we shall 
cherish this remembrance of the place ; and so it 
will be green and sunshiny through winter days. 




CHAPTER XII. 



CONCERNING THE RIGHT TACK; 

WITH SOME THOUGHTS ON THE WRONG 
TACK. 




OT many days since, I was walking along 
a certain street, in a certain city : and 
there I beheld two little boys of the better 
sort fighting furiously. There are people, claiming 
to be what is vulgarly called Muscular Christians, 
who think that a certain amount of fighting among 
boys is to be very much encouraged, as a thing 
tending to make the little fellows manly and cou- 
rageous. For myself, I believe that God's law is 
wise as well as right : and I do not believe that angry 
passion (which God's law condemns), or that vin- 
dictive efforts to do mischief to a fellow-creature 
(which God's law also condemns), are things which 
deserve to be in any way encouraged ; or are things 
likely to develop in either man or boy the kind of 
character which wise and good people would wish 
to see. Accordingly I interposed in the fight, and 



Concerning the Right Tack. 



0/ 



sought to make peace between the little men : sup- 
porting my endeavours by some general statement 
to the effect that good boys ought not to be fighting 
in that way. They stopped at once : no doubt both 
had had enough of that kind of thing. For one had 
a bloody nose ; and the other had a rudimentary 
black eye, which next morning would be manifest. 
But one of them defended himself against the 
charge of having done anything wrong, by saying, 
with the energy of one who was quite assured 
that he had the principles of eternal justice on his 
side, ' I have a right to hit him, because he hit me 
first!' 

Of course, these were suggestive w^ords. And I 
could not but think to myself, walking away from 
the little fellows after having composed their strife, 
Now tJiere is the principle upon which this Vv'orld 
goes on. There is not a deeper-rooted tendency in 
human nature, than that which is exhibited in that 
saying of that fine little boy. For he ivas a fine 
little boy ; and so was the other. The great prin- 
ciple on which most human beings go, in all the 
relations and all the doings of life, is just that w^hich 
is compendiously expressed in the words, ' I have 
a right to hit you, if you hit me first,' You may 
trace the manifestations of that great principle in all 
possible walks of life, and among all sorts and con- 
ditions of men. One man or woman says something 
unkind of another : the other feels quite entitled to 

S 



258 Concerning the Right Tack. 

retaliate by saying something unkind of the first. 
And this tendency appears early. I once heard a 
little boy of four years old say, with some indigna- 
tion of manner : ' Miss Smith said I was a trouble- 
some monkey: if she ever says ///^/ again, I'll say 
that she is an ugly old maid!' One man says, in 
print, something depreciatory of another ; finds fault 
with something the other man has said, or written, 
or done. Then the other man retorts in kind : pays 
off the first man by publishing something depre- 
ciatory of him. A great many of the political essays 
which we read in the newspapers ; and a great many 
of the reviews of books we meet ; are manifestly 
dictated and inspired by the purpose to revenge 
some personal offence : to clear off scores by hitting 
the man who has hit you. A sharp, clever person 
reads the book written by an enemy, with the de- 
termination to pick holes in it : not that the book 
is bad, or that he thinks it bad : but its author has 
given him some offence, and that is to be retaliated. 
You remember, of course, that very clever and very 
bitter article on Mr. Croker's edition of Boswell's 
Life of Johnson, which is contained in Lord Mac- 
aulay's selection of essays from the Edinbzirgh 
Review. Was there any mortal who supposed that 
when Macaulay's own History of E7tgland di^^Qdirtd, 
Mr. Croker would review it otherwise than with a 
determination to find faults in it .^ Was there any 
mortal surprised to find that Mr. Croker, having 



Concerning the Right Tack. 259 

been hit by Macaulay, endeavoured to hit Macaulay 
again ? And if Macaulay's History had been abso- 
lutely immaculate, had been a thousand times better 
than it is, do you suppose tJiat would appreciably 
have affected the tone of Mr. Croker s reviev/ of it ? 
I am far from saying that Mr. Croker deliberately 
made up his mind to do injustice to Lord Macaulay. 
It is likely enough he thought Macaulay richly 
deserved all the ill he said of him. A great law of 
mind governs even human beings who never came 
to a formal resolution of obeying it : as a stream 
never pauses to consider whether, at a certain point, 
it shall run downhill or up. When SirBulwer Lytton, 
in his poem of The New Timon, alluded to Mr. 
Tennyson in disparaging terms as Miss Alfred, no 
one was surprised to read, in a few days, that terribly 
trenchant copy of verses in which Mr. Tennyson 
called Sir Bulwer a Bandbox, and showed that the 
true Timon was quite a different man from the 
Bandbox with his mane in curl-papers. For such is 
the incongruous imagery which the reader will carry 
away from that poem. And if you happen, my 
reader, to be acquainted with three or four men who 
have opportunity to carry on their quarrels in print, 
or by speeches in deliberative assemblies ; and if 
you refuse to take part in the quarrels which divide 
them, and keep resolutely on friendly terms with 
all : you will be struck by the fact that the system 
of mutual hitting and retaliation, carried on for 



26o Concerning the Right Tack. 

a while, quite incapacitates these men for doing each 
other anything Hke justice : each will occasionally 
caution you against his adversary as a very wicked 
and horrible person : while you, knowing both, are 
well aware that each is in the main an able and 
good-hearted human being, not without some salient 
faults, of course : and that the image of each which 
is present to the mind of the other is a frightful cari- 
cature : is about as like the being represented as the 
most awful photograph ever taken by an ingenious 
youthful amateur is like you, my good-looking friend. 
I have named deliberative assemblies. Everybody 
knows in how striking a fashion you will find the 
great principle of retaliation exhibited in such : and 
nowhere, I lament to say, more decidedly than in 
presbyteries, synods, and general assemblies, where 
you might naturally expect better things. I have 
heard a revered friend say, that only the imperative 
sense of duty would ever lead him to such places : 
and that the effect of their entire tone upon his moral 
and spiritual nature was the very reverse of health- 
ful. One man, in a speech, says something sharp of 
another : of course, when the first man sits down, 
the second gets up, and says something unkind of 
his brother. And you will sometimes find men, 
with a calculating rancour; and with what Mr. 
Croker, speaking of Earl Russell, called ' a spiteful 
slyness ;' wait their opportunity, that they may deal 
the return blow at the time and place where it will 



Concerning the Right Tack. 261 

be most keenly felt. Now all this, which is bad in 
anybody, is more evidently bad in men who on the 
previous Sunday were, not improbably, preaching on 
the duty of forgiving injuries. All clergymen have 
frequent occasion to repeat certain words which run 
to the effect, ' And forgive us our trespasses, as we 
forgive them that trespass against us.' Yet you may 
find a clergyman, here and there, whose reputation 
is high as a very hard hitter ; and as one who never 
suffers any breath of assault to pass without keenly 
retaliating. If you touch such a man, however dis- 
tantly : if, in the midst of a general panegyric, you 
venture to hint that anything he has done is Avrong : 
he will flare up, and you will have a savage reply. 
You know the consequence of touching /inn, just as 
you know the consequence of giving a kick to a fero- 
cious bulldog. Now, is that a fine thing .^ Is it any- 
thing to boast of .^ I have heard a middle-aged man 
(not a clergyman) state in an ostentatious manner, 
that he never forgot an offence: that whoever touched 
him would some day (as schoolboys say) cafc/i it. 
All this struck me as tremendously small. In the 
case of most people who talk in that way, it is not 
true. They are not nearly so bad as they would 
like you to think them. They don't cherish resent- 
ments in that vindictive way. But if it were true, 
it would be nothing to be proud of I have heard 
a man boast that he had never thanked anybody for 
anything all his life. I thought him very silly. He 



262 Concerning the Right Tack. 

expected me to think him very great. I well remem- 
ber how, in a certain senate, after two older mem- 
bers, each a wise and good man when you got him 
in his right mind, had spent some time in mutual 
recrimination, a younger member took occasion 
to point out that all this was very far from being 
right or pleasing. To which one of the good men 
replied, in a ferocious voice, and with a very red 
face, as if that answer settled the matter, ^ BiU who 
began it ?' No doubt, the other had begun it : and 
that good man took refuge in the angry schoolboy's 
principle, ' I have a right to hit him, because he 
hit me!' 

I have been speaking, you see, of those little 
offences, and those little retaliations, which we 
have occasion to observe daily, in the comparative 
trimness and restraint of modern life : and in a state 
of society where a certain Christian tone of feeling, 
and the strong hand of the law, limit the offences 
which can be commonly given, and the vengeance 
which can be commonly taken. My good friend 

A, who has been several times attacked in print by 

B, would probably kick B, if various social restraints 
did not prevent him. But, however open the way 
might be, I really don't believe that A would cut 
B's throat, or burn his house and children and other 
possessions. No : I don't think he would. Still, 
there is nothing I less like to do, than to talk in a 
dogmatic and confident fashion. If Mr. C applies 



Concerning the Right Tack. 26 



to the university of D for the honorary degree of 
Doctor of Music, and is refused that distinction, 
mainly (as C beheves) through the opposition of 
Professor E ; although C may retort upon E by a 
malicious article in a newspaper, containing several 
gross falsehoods, I really believe, and I may say I 
hope, and even surmise, that C, even if he had the 
chance, would not exactly poison E with strychnine. 
And I may say that I firmly believe, from the little 
I have seen of C's writings (by which alone I know 
him), that nothing would induce C to poison E, if 
C were entirely assured that if he poisoned E, he 
(C) would infallibly be detected and hanged. But 
we are cautious now : and, through various circum- 
stances, our claws have been cut short. It was 
different long ago. Of course we all know how, in 
the old days, insult or injury was often wiped out 
in blood : how it was a step in advance, even to 
establish the stern principle of ' an eye for an eye, 
and a tooth for a tooth : hand for hand, foot for 
foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe 
for stripe.' For tJiat principle made sure that the 
retaliation should at least not exceed the first 
offence : while formerly, and even afterwards where 
that principle was not recognised, very fanciful 
offences, and very small injuries, sometimes resulted 
in the quenching of many lives : in the carrying 
fire and sword over great tracts of country : and in 
the perpetuating of bloody feuds between whole 



264 Concerning the Right Tack. 

tribes for age after age. You know that there have 
been countries and times in which Revenge was 
organised into a scientific art ; in which the terrible 
veiidetta, proclaimed between families, was main- 
tained through successive centuries till one or the 
other was utterly extinguished : and a regularly 
kept record preserved the story how this and the 
other member of the proscribed race had been 
ruined, or imprisoned in a hopeless dungeon, or by 
false testimony brought within the grasp of cruel 
laws, or directly murdered outright, by some one of 
the race to which was committed the task of ven- 
geance. You know how the dying father has, with 
his latest breath, charged his son to devote himself 
to the destruction of the clan that lived beyond the 
hill or across the river, because of some old offence 
whose history was almost forgot : you know how 
the Campbell and the Macgregor, the Maxwell and 
the Johnstone, the Chattan and the Quhele — in 
Scotland — were hereditary foes ; and how, in many 
other instances, the very infant was born into his 
ancestors' quarrel. You have heard how a dying 
man, told by the minister of religion that now he 
must forgive every enemy as he himself hoped to be 
forgiven, has said to his surviving child, * Well, / 
must forgive such a one ; but my curse be upon you 
\i you do ! ' I am not going to give you a historical 
view, or anything like a historical view, of a mise- 
rable subject: but every reader knows well that 



Concernhig the Right Tack. 265 

there is not a blacker nor more deplorable page in 
the history of human kind, than that which tells us 
how faithfully, how unsparingly, how bloodily, the 
great principle of returning evil for evil has been 
carried out by human beings : the great rule, not of 
doing to others as you would that they should do 
to you, but of doing to others as they have done to 
you, or perhaps as you think they would do to you 
if they had the chance : in short, the great funda- 
mental principle, of universal application, set out in 
the words of my little friend with the inchoate 
black eye, ' I have a right to hit him, because he 
hit me first ! ' 

Now, all this kind of thing is what I mean by 
The Wrong Tack. 

My friendly reader, there is another way of 
meeting injury and unkindness : and a better way. 
The natural thing, unquestionably, is, to return 
evil for evil. The Christian thing, and the better 
way, is to ' overcome evil with good.' There was 
a certain Great Teacher, who was infinitely more 
than a Great Teacher, who taught all who should 
be His followers till the end of time, that the right 
thing would always be to meet unkindness with 
kindness : to forgive men their trespasses, as we 
hope our Heavenly Father will forgive ours : to love 
our enemies, bless them that curse us, do good to 
them that hate us, and pray for them which despite- 
fuUy use us and persecute us, — if such people be. 



266 Concermng the Right Tack. 

And an eminent Philosopher, whom some people 
would probably appreciate more highly if he had 
not been also an inspired Apostle, spoke not un- 
worthily of his Divine Master when he said, ' Re- 
compense to no man evil for evil : dearly beloved, 
avenge not yourselves : If thine enemy hunger, feed 
him ; if he thirst, give him drink. Be not overcome 
of evil, but overcome evil with good.' 

Now, all this kind of thing is what I mean by 
The Right Tack. 

There is no need at all to try formally to define 
what is intended by the Right Tack. Everyone 
knows all about it : and its meaning will become 
plainer as we go on. Of course, the general idea is, 
that we should try to meet unkindness with kind- 
ness : unfairness with fairness : a bad word with a 
good one. The general idea is this : Such a neigh- 
bour or acquaintance has spoken of you unhand- 
somely : has treated you unjustly. Well, you 
determine that you will not go and make yourself 
as bad as he is ; and carry on the quarrel, and 
increase the bad feeling that already exists ; by 
trying to retort in kind : by saying a bad word 
about him, or by doing him an unfriendly turn. 
No : you resolve to go upon another tack entirely. 
You will treat the person with scrupulous fairness. 
You try to think kindly of him, and to discover 
some excuse for his conduct towards you : and if 
an opportunity occurs of doing him a kind turn, 



Concerning the Right Tack. 267 

you do it, frankly and heartily. Let me say, that 
if you try, in a fair spirit, and in a kind spirit, to 
discover some excuse for the bad way in which that 
person has treated you, or spoken of you, you will 
seldom have much difficulty in doing so. You will 
easily think of some little provocation you gave 
him, very likely without in the least intending it ; 
you will easily see that your neighbour was speak- 
ing or acting under some misconception or mistake: 
you will easily enough think of many little things 
in his condition — painful, mortifying, anxious things 
— which may well be taken as some excuse for worse 
words and doings than ever proceeded from him 
concerning you. Ah, my brother, most people in 
these days, if you did but know all their condition, 
all about their families and their circumstances, 
have so many causes of disquiet, and anxiety, and 
irritation, to fever the weary heart, and to shake 
the shaken nerves, that a wise and good man will 
never make them offenders for a hasty word ; or 
even for an uncharitable suspicion or an unkind 
deed, very likely hardly said or done till it was 
bitterly repented. My friend Smith, who is one of 
the best of men, was one day startled, attending a 
meeting of a certain senatorial body, to hear Mr. 
Jones get up and make a speech in the nature of a 
most vicious attack upon Smith. Smith listened 
attentively to a few paragraphs : and then, turn- 
ing to the man next to him, put the following 



268 Concerning the Right Tack. 

question : ' I say, Brown, is not that poor fellow's 
stomach often very much out of order?' * He 
suffers from it horribly,' was the true reply. *■ Ah 
that's it, poor fellow,' said Smith ; ' I see what it is 
that is exacerbating his temper, and making him 
talk in that way.' And when Jones sat down, 
Smith got up, with a kindly face: I don't mean 
with a provokingly benevolent and forgiving look : 
and in a simple, earnest way, justified the conduct 
which had been attacked, in a manner which con- 
veyed that he was really anxious that Jones should 
think well of him : all this without the slightest 
complaint of Jones's bitterness, or the least refer- 
ence to it. Smith had only done Jones justice in 
all this. He had done no more than allow for 
something which ought to be allowed for. And 
Jones was fairly beaten. After the meeting, he 
went to Smith and asked his pardon : saying that 
he really had been feeling so ill that he did not 
know very well what he was saying. Smith shook 
hands with poor Jones in a way that warmed 
Jones's heart : and they were better friends than 
ever from that day forward. But in the lot of 
many a man, there are worse things than little 
physical uneasinesses, for which a wise man will 
always allow in estimating an offence given. Yes : 
there are people with so much to embitter them : 
poor fellows so sadly disappointed: clever, sensitive 
men so terribly misplaced, so grievously tried : with^ 



Concerning the Right Tack. 269 

their keenly sensitive nature so daily rasped, so 
horribly blistered, by coarse, uncongenial natures 
and by unhappy circumstances : that I am not 
afraid to say that a truly good man, if such a poor 
fellow pitched into him ever so bitterly, or did 
anything short of hitting him over the head with a 
more than commonly thick stick, would do no more 
than beg the poor fellow's pardon. 

But mind, too, my friend, that all this kindly 
way of judging your fellow-creatures — all this 
returning of good for evil, — must be a real thing, 
and not a pretence. It must not be a hypocri- 
tical varnishing over of a deep angry and bitter 
feeling within us. It must not be something 
done with the purpose of putting our neighbour 
still further and still more conspicuously in the 
wrong. And far less must it consist in mere words 
with no real meaning. Neither must it consist, as 
it sometimes in fact does, in saying of an offending 
neighbour, ' I bear him no malice : I forgive him 
heartily : I make no evil return for his infamous 
conduct towards me : ' when in truth, in the very 
words of forgiveness, you have said of your offend- 
ing neighbour just the very worst you could say. 
You may remember certain lines which appeared 
in a London newspaper several years since, which 
purported to be a free translation into rhyme 
of a speech made in the House of Peers by 
an eminent bishop. In that speech the blameless 



270 Concer7iing the Right Tack. 

prelate spoke of a certain order of men whose tastes 
were very offensive to him. He said they 

Were the vilest race 
That ever in earth or hell had place : 
He would not prejudge them — no, not he, 
For his soul o'erflowed with charity. 
Incarnate fiends, he would not condemn ; 
No, God forbid he should slander them : 
Foul swine, their lordships must confess 
He used them with Christian gentleness. 
He hated all show of persecution, — 
But why weren't they sent to execution ? 

I have no doubt whatever that these lines (which 
form part of a considerable poem) are an extreme 
exaggeration of what the bishop did actually say : 
yet I have just as little doubt that in his speech 
the bishop did exhibit something of that tone. For 
I have known human beings, not a few, who dili- 
gently endeavoured to combine the forgiving of a 
man with the pitching into him just as hard as 
they conveniently could. Now, that will not do. 
You must make your choice. You cannot at the 
same time have the satisfaction of wreaking your 
vengeance upon one who has injured you, and like- 
wise the magnanimous pleasure of thinking that 
you have Christianly forgiven him. Your returning 
of good for evil must be a real thing. It must be 
done heartily, and without reservation in your own 
mind : or it is nothing at all. Uriah Heep, in 
Mr. Dickens's beautiful story, forgave David Copper- 



Concerning the Right Tack. 271 

field for striking him a blow. But Uriah Heep 
never did anything more vicious, more thoroughly 
malignant, than that hypocritical act. But it was 
vicious and malignant, just because it was hypo- 
critical. In matters like this, sincerity is the touch- 
stone. 

I suppose most readers will agree with me when 
I say, that I know no Christian duty which is so 
grievously neglected by people claiming to be 
extremely good. There is no mistake whatever as 
to what is the Christian way of meeting an unkind- 
ness or an unfriendly act : it is very desirable that 
professing Christians had more faith in its efficiency. 
It would be well if we could all heartily believe, 
and act upon the belief, that our Maker knows and 
advises the right and happy way of meeting a 
bad turn when it may be done to us, however natu- 
rally our own hearts may suggest a very different 
way. But I fear that our experience of life has 
convinced most of us, that this duty of returning 
good for evil is one that is very commonly and 
very thoroughly shelved. A great many people 
set it aside, as something all very good and proper : 
very fit for the Bible to recommend, setting up (as 
the Bible of course ought to do) a perfect ideal : 
but as something that luill not work. AVe have all 
a little of that feeling latent in us. And here and 
there you may find a human being, perhaps a 
person of an exceedingly loud and ostentatious 



272 Concerning the Right Tack. 

religious profession, who is so touchy, so ready to 
take offence, and then so vindictive and unsparing 
in following up the man that gave it, and in re- 
taliating by word and deed, — by abusive speeches, 
and malicious writings, and ill-set demeanour 
generally, — that it is extremely plain, that though 
that man might sympathetically shake his head if 
he were told to ' overcome evil with good,' and 
accept tJiat as a noble precept, still his real motto 
ought rather to be that simple and compendious 
rule of life, ' I will hit you, if you hit me ! ' 

I am going to point out certain reasons which 
make me call the rule of meeting evil with good 
tJie Right Tack ; and the rule of meeting evil with 
evil the Wrong Tack. For one thing, the Right 
Tack is the effectual way. What the second thing 
is, I don't choose to tell you till you arrive at it in 
the regular course of diligently reading these pages. 
Let there be no skipping. So, for one thing at a 
time, the Right Tack is the effectual thing. 

Of course, the natural impulse is, to return a 
blow, and to resent an injury or insult. TJiat is 
the first thing that we are ready to do. We do 
that almost instinctively : certainly with little pre- 
vious reflection. And a brute does tJiat, just as 
naturally as a man. It is nothing to boast of, that 
you stand on the same level as a vicious horse, or 
a savage bulldog, or an angry hornet. But, then, 
that does not overcome the evil. No : it perpetuates 



Concerning the Right Tack. 273 

and increases it. It provokes a rejoinder in kind; 
that provokes another : and thus the mischief grows, 
till from a small offence at the beginning, vast and 
comprehensive sin and misery have arisen. But go 
on the other tack : and you will soon see, from the 
little child at play, up to the worn man with his 
long experience of this world, how the soft answer 
turns away wrath, and the kind and good deed 
beats the evil! There is a beautiful little tract, 
called The Ma7t that killed his Neighbours : which 
sets forth how a good man, coming to a cantan- 
kerous district, by pure force of persevering and 
hearty kindness, fairly killed various unfriendly 
neighbours, who met him with many unfriendly 
acts. He killed the enemy, that is : he did not kill 
the individual man : but the enemy was altogether 
annihilated : and the individual man continued to 
exist as a fast friend. There is something left in 
average human nature even yet, which makes it 
very hard indeed to go on doing ill to a man who 
goes on showing kindness to you. You may get 
that tract for twopence : go and pay your twopence, 
and (after finishing this essay) read that tract. No 
doubt, there is so much that is mean and unworthy 
in some hearts, and people so naturally judge 
others by themselves, that there may be found 
those who cannot understand this returning of good 
for evil : who will suspect there is something wrong 
lurking under it : and who will not believe that it 

T 



2 74 Concerning the Right Tack. 

is all sincere and hearty. And many an honest and 
forgiving heart has felt it as a trial to have its good 
intentions so misconceived. My friend Green once 
wrote an article in a magazine. In a certain 
brilliant weekly periodical there appeared a notice 
of that article, finding fault with it. And a week or 
two after, in another article in the magazine, 
Green, in a good-natured way, replied to the notice 
in the weekly periodical ; and while defending 
himself in so far, admitted candidly that there was 
a good deal of truth in the strictures of the weekly 
periodical. Green did all that, just as bears and 
lions growl and fight, because it was *his nature 
to : ' it cost him no effort ; and assuredly there was 
no hypocritical affectation in what he did : he felt 
no bitterness, and so he showed none: he was 
amused by the clever attack upon him, and showed 
that he was amused. Some time after this, I read 
an ill-natured notice of Green in a newspaper, in 
w^hich, among his other misdoings, there was 
reckoned up this rejoinder to the brilliant weekly 
periodical. He was likened to Uriah Heep, already 
mentioned : he was accused of hypocrisy, of arrogant 
humility, and the like. Of course, it was manifest 
to all who knew Green, that his assailant knew as 
much about Green's character as he does about the 
unexplored tracts of Central Africa. But a mean- 
spirited man cannot even understand a generous 
one : and the assailant could not find it in himself 



Concerning the Right Tack. 275 

to believe that Green was a frank, honest man, 
writing out of the frankness of an unsuspecting heart. 
So, X and Y were once attacked in print by Z : X 
thereafter cut Z. Y remained on friendly terms 
with Z, as previously. Y pointed out to X that it 
is foolish to quarrel with a man for attacking you, 
even severely, upon properly critical grounds. Y 
further said, that he would never quarrel with a 
man who attacked him even in the most unfair 
way : that he would treat the attacking party with 
kindness, and try to show him that his unfavourable 
estimate was a mistaken one. ' Ah,' replied X, 
* you are scheming to get Z to puff you ! ' To meet 
evil with good, X plainly thought, is a thing that 
could not be done in good faith, and just because 
it is the right thing to do. There must be some 
underhand, unworthy motive. And the greatest 
obstacle that you are likely to find, in habitually 
meeting evil with good, will be the misconstruction 
of your conduct by some of the people that know 
you. No doubt, Uriah Heep himself, and all his 
relatives, will be ready to represent that you are a 
humbug and a sneak Well, it is a great pity. But 
you cannot help that. Go on still on the Right 
Tack : and by-and-by it will come to be understood 
that you go upon it in all honesty and truth, and 
with no sinister nor underhand purpose. And when 
this comes to be understood, then the evil in almost 
every case will be overcome, and that effectually. 



276 Concerning the Right Tack. 

No human being, unless some quite exceptionally 
hardened reprobate, will long go on doing ill to 
another who only and habitually returns good 
for it. 

This is not an essay for Sunday reading : it is 
meant to be quietly read over upon the evening of 
any day from Monday till Saturday inclusive. But 
that is no reason why I should not say to you, my 
friend, that you and I ought to bring the whole 
force of our Christian life and principle to bear upon 
this point. Let us determine that, by the help of 
God's Holy Spirit, without whom we can do nothing 
as we ought, we shall faithfully go upon the right 
tack through all the little ruffles and offences of 
daily life. If the sharp retort comes to your lips, 
remember that it touches the momentous question 
whether you are a Christian at all, or not, that you 
hold that sharp word back, and say a kind one. If 
Mr. A., or Miss B. (a poor old maid, soured a good 
deal by a tolerably bitter life), speak unkindly of 
you, or do you some little injustice, say a good word 
or do a good deed to either of them in return. 
Pray for God's grace to help you habitually to do 
all that. It will not be easy to do all that at the 
first ; but it will always grow easier the longer you 
try it. It will grow easier, because the resolution 
to go on the right tack will gain strength by habit. 
And it will grow easier too, because when those 
around you know that you honestly take Christ's 



Concerning the Right Tack. 277 

own way of returning an injury, not many will have 
the heart to injure you : very few will injure you 
twice. I have the firmest belief, that the true 
system of Mental Philosophy is that which is im- 
plied in the New Testament : and that there never 
was any one who knew so well the kind of thing 
that would suit the whole constitution of man, 
and the whole system of this universe, as He who 
made them both. 

One case is worth many reasonings. Let me 
relate a true story. Not many years since there 
was in Mesopotamia a Christian merchant ; of great 
wealth, and with the Right Spirit in him. A neigh- 
bouring trader, who did not know much about the 
Christian merchant, published a calumnious pam- 
phlet about him. The Christian merchant read it : 
it was very abusive and wicked and malicious. In 
point of style it was something like the little docu- 
ment which contains the articles about Good Words 
which appeared in a newspaper called Christian 
Charity. The Christian merchant, I repeat, read 
the pamphlet : all he said waf^, that the man who 
wrote it would be sorry for it some day. This was 
told the libellous trader : who replied that he would 
take care that the Christian merchant should never 
have the chance of hurting him. But men in trade 
cannot always decide who their creditors shall be : 
and in a few months the trader became a bankrupt, 
and the Christian merchant was his chief creditor. 



278 Concerning the Right Tack. 

The poor man sought to make some arrangement 
that would let him work for his children again. But 
every one told him that this was impossible without 
the consent of Mr. Grant. That was the Christian 
merchant's honoured name. ' I need not go to hiinl 
the poor bankrupt said : * I can expect no favour 
from hi7n! * Try him,' said somebody who knew 
the good man better. So the bankrupt went to 
Mr. Grant ; and told his sad story, of heavy losses, 
and of heartless work and sore anxiety and priva- 
tion : and asked Mr. Grant's signature to a paper 
already signed by the others to whom he was in- 
debted. '■ Give me the paper,' said Mr. Grant, sitting 
down at his desk. It was given : and the good man, 
as he glanced over it, said, ' You wrote a pamphlet 
about me once:' and without waiting a reply, handed 
back the paper, having written something upon it. 
The poor bankrupt expected to find libeller, or slaii- 
derer, or something like that written. But no : there 
it was, fair and plain, the signature that was needed 
to give him another chance in life. ' I said, you 
would be sorry for writing that pamphlet,' the good 
man went on. ' I did not mean it as a threat. I 
meant that some day you would know me better, 
and see that I did not deserve to be attacked in 
that way. And now,' said the good man, ' tell me 
all about your prospects : and especially tell me 
how your wife and children are faring.' The poor 
trader told him, that to partly meet his debts he 



Concernhig the Right Tack. 279 

had given up everything he had in the world ; and 
that for many days they had hardly had bread to 
eat. ' That will never do/ said the Christian mer- 
chant, putting in the poor man's hand money enough 
to support the pinched wife and children for many 
weeks. ' This will last for a little, and you shall 
have more when it is gone : and I shall find some 
way to help you, and by God's blessing you will do 
beautifully yet. Don't lose heart : I'll stand by 
you !' I suppose I need not tell you that the poor 
man's full heart fairly overflowed, and he went away 
crying like a child. Yes, the Right Tack is the 
effectual thing ! To meet evil with good, fairly 
beats the evil, and puts it down. The poor debtor 
was set on his feet again : the hungry little children 
were fed. And the trader never published an attack 
upon that good man again as long as he lived. And 
among the good man's multitude of friends, as he 
grew old among all the things that should accom- 
pany old age, there was not a truer or heartier one 
than the old enemy thus fairly beaten ! Yes, my 
reader : let us go upon the Right Tack ! 

And now for the other reason I promised to give 
you why I call all this the Right Tack. It is not 
merely the most effectual thing : it is the happiest 
thing. You will feel jolly (to use a powerful and 
classical expression) when, in spite of strong temp- 
tation to take the other way, you resolutely go on 



28o Concerning the Right Tack. 

the Right Tack. I suppose that when the poor 
trader, already named, went away with his full 
heart, feeling himself a different man from what he 
had been when he entered the merchant's room, and 
hastening home to tell his wife and children that he 
had found God's kind angel in the shape of a white- 
haired old gentleman in a snuff-coloured suit, and 
wearing gaiters, — I suppose there would not be 
many happier men in this world than that truly 
Christian merchant prince. He was very much 
accustomed, indeed, to the peculiar feeling of a man 
who has returned good for evil : but this feeling is 
one which no familiarity can bring into contempt. 
But suppose Mr. Grant had gone on the other tack : 
said, ' You libelled me once : it is my turn now : 
you shall smart for it : ' I don't think any of us 
would envy him his malignant satisfaction. And 
when he went home that night to his grand house, 
and enjoyed all the advantages which came of his 
great wealth, I don't think he would relish them 
more for thinking of the bare home where the poor 
debtor had gone, with his last hopes crushed, and 
for thinking of the little hungry children ; — of little 
Tom sobbing himself to sleep without any supper, — 
of little Mary, somewhat older, saying, with her 
thin white face, that she did not want any. At 
least, if he had found happiness in all this, most 
human beings, with human hearts, would class him 
with devils, rather than with men. Give me Lu- 



Concerning the Right Tack. 281 

cifer at once, with horns and hoofs, rather than 
the rancorous old villain in the snuff-coloured 
suit! 

It causes suffering to ordinary human beings, to 
be involved in strife. It is a dull, rankling pain. 
It has a cross-influence on all you do. And reading 
your Bible, and praying to God, it will often come 
across you with a sad sense of self-accusing. You 
will not be able to entirely acquit yourself of blame. 
You will feel that all this is not very consistent with 
your Christian profession : with your seasons at the 
communion-table : with your prayers for forgiveness 
as you hope to be forgiven : with the remembrance 
that in a little while you must lay down your weary 
head, and die. The man who has dealt another a 
stinging blow, in return for some injury : the man 
who has made an exceedingly clever and bitter 
retort, in speech or in writing : may feel a certain 
complacency, thinking how well he has done it, and 
what vexation he has probably caused to a fellow- 
sinner and fellow-sufferer. But he cannot be happy. 
He cannot I He cannot know the real glow of 
heart that you will feel, my reader, when God's 
blessed Spirit has helped you, with all your heart, 
to do something kind and good to an offending 
brother. Yes, it is the greatest luxury in which a 
human being can indulge himself, the luxury of 
going upon the Right Tack when you are strongly 
tempted to go upon the Wrong ! 



282 Concerning the Right Tack. 

I must speak seriously. I cannot help it. All 
this is unutterably important; and I cannot leave 
you, my friend, with any show of lightness in speak- 
ing about it. All this is of the very essence of our 
religion : it goes to the great question, whether or 
not we are Christian people at all : it touches the 
very ground of our acceptance with God, and the 
pardon of our manifold sins. There are certain 
words never to be forgotten : * If ye forgive men 
their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also 
forgive you : But if ye forgive not men their tres- 
passes, neither will your Father forgive your tres- 
passes.' Yes : the taint of rankling malice in our 
hearts, when we go to God and ask for pardoning 
mercy, will turn our prayers into an imprecation 
for wrath. ' Forgive us our debts, as we forgive 
our debtors :' Forgive us our sins against Thee, just 
as much as we forgive other men their offences 
against us : that is, not at all ! Think of the un- 
forgiving man or woman who returns evil for evil, 
going to God with that prayer ! I cannot say how 
glad and thankful I should be, if I thought that all 
this I have been writing would really influence some 
of those who may read this page, to resolve, by 
God's grace, that when they are daily tempted to 
little resentments by little offences, — and it is only 
by these that most Christians in actual life are 
tried, — they will habitually go on the Right Tack ! 
But remember, my friend, that nothing you have 



Concerning the Right Tack. 283 

read is more real and practical, — nothing bears 
more directly upon the interests of the life we are 
daily leading, with all its little worries, trials, and 
cares, — than what I say now : that it is only by the 
help and grace of the Holy Spirit of God that you 
can ever thoroughly and effectually do what I mean 
by going upon the Right Tack. A calm and kindly 
temperament is good : a disposition to see what 
may be said in defence of such as offend you, is 
good : and doubtless these are helps : but something 
far more and higher is needed. There must be a lof- 
tier and more excellent inspiration than that of the 
calm head and the kind heart. You will never do 
anything rightly, never anything steadfastly, that 
goes against the grain of human nature, except by 
the grace of that Blessed One who makes us new 
creatures in Christ. There will be something that 
will not ring sound about all that meeting evil with 
good, which does not proceed from the new heart, 
and the right spirit sanctified of God. 

Now, let there be no misunderstanding of all 
this : and no pushing it into an extreme opposed to 
common sense. All this that has been said, has 
been said concerning the little offences of daily life. 
As regards these, I believe that what I have called 
the Right Tack is the effectual thing and the happy 
thing. But I am no advocate of the principle of 
non-resistance. I am no member of the Peace 
Society. I have no wish to see Britain disband her 



284 Concerning the Right Tack. 

armies, and dismantle her navy, and lie as a help- 
less prey at the mercy of any tyrant or invader. 
No : I should wish our country's claws to be sharp 
and strong : that is the way to prevent the need 
for their use from arising. I should, with regret, 
but without conscientious scruple, shoot a burglar 
who intended to murder me. I heartily approve the 
blowing of a rebel sepoy away from a cannon. And 
though the punishment of death, as inflicted in this 
country, is a miserable necessity, still I believe it is 
a necessity, and a thing morally right, in almost 
every case in which it is inflicted. All that has 
been said about the returning of good for evil is to 
be read in the light of common sense. There are 
bad people whom you cannot tame or put down, 
except by the severe hand of Justice. And in 
taming them in the only possible way, you are doing 
nothing inconsistent with the views set forth in these 
pages. It would take too much time to argue the 
matter fully out: and it is really needless. A wrong- 
headed man, a member of the Peace Society, has 
published a pamphlet in which he frankly tells us 
that if he, and his wife and children, were about to 
be murdered by a burglar, and if there was no 
possibility of preventing this murdering except by 
killing the burglar ; then it would be the duty of a 
Christian to die as a martyr to his principles, and 
peaceably allow the burglar to murder him and his 
family. Really there is nothing to be said in reply 



Concernirig the Right Tack. 



to such a puzzle-head, except that I would just as 
soon believe that black is white, as that tJiat is a 
Christian duty. There are exceptional human 
beings who are really wild beasts : and who must 
be treated precisely as a savage wild beast should 
be treated. And even in the matter of injuries of a 
less decided character than the murdering of your- 
self, your wife and children, it is as plain as need 
be that a wise and good man may very fitly defend 
himself against the aggression of a ruffian. When 
Mr. Macpherson threatened to thrash Dr. Johnson 
for expressing doubts as to the genuineness of 
Ossian, Dr. Johnson was quite right to provide a 
stick of great size and weight, and to carry it about 
with him for the purpose of self-defence. And while 
desirous to obey the spirit of the Saviour's com- 
mand, there are few things of which I feel more 
certain, than that if a blackguard struck my good 
friend Dr. A. on the right cheek, the blameless 
divine would not turn the other also. Nor need we 
make the least objection to the motto of a certain 
Northern country, which conveys that people had 
better be careful how they do that country any 
wrong, inasmuch as that country won't stand it. 
There is nothing amiss in the Nemo me impu7te 
lacesset. Don't meddle with us : we have not the 
least wish to meddle with vou. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



CONCERNING NEEDLESS FEARS. 




T the present moment, I feel very uncom- 
fortable. Not physically, but mentally 
and morally. And I do not know why. 

What I mean is, that a little ago some disagree- 
able thought was presented to my mind, which put 
me quite out of sorts. And though I have forgotten 
what the disagreeable thought was, its effect re- 
mains : and I still feel out of sorts. I am aware of 
a certain moral aching, which I cannot refer to its 
cause. I suppose, my reader, you have often felt 
the like. You have been conscious of a certain 
gloom, depression, bewilderment : not remembering 
what it was that started it. But after a little time 
it suddenly flashes on you ; and you remember the 
whole thing. 

I can imagine a man going to be hanged, waking 
up on the fatal morning with a dull aching sense of 
something wrong, he does not know what : till all 



Concerning Needless Fears. 287 

at once the dreadful reality glares upon him. Some 
of us have had the experience, as little boys, when 
coming back to consciousness on the morning of the 
day we had to return to school, far away from home. 
In certain cases, returning to school is to a boy not 
many degrees less unendurable than being hanged 
is to a man. Of course there is no remorse in the 
case of the little schoolboy: and here is a discrepance 
between the cases suggested. But indeed it is vain 
to estimate the relative crushing powers of two great 
trials. Each at the time is just as much as one can 
bear. 

But (to go back a little), just as a strong hand, 
seven hundred years since, set a large stone in its 
place in a cathedral wall, and the stone remains 
there to-day, though the hand that placed it is gone 
and forgot : in like manner some painful reflection 
jars the human mind, and puts it out of joint ; and 
it remains jarred and out of joint after the painful 
reflection has passed away. A cloud passes between 
us and the sun; and a sudden gloom and chill fall 
upon all things. But, strange to say, in the moral 
world, after the cloud that brought the gloom and 
chill has passed, the gloom and chill remain. And 
thus, a human being may feel very uncomfortable, 
and know that he has good reason for being uncom- 
fortable; yet not know what the reason is. If 
you receive ten letters before breakfast, you open 
them all and read them hastily. It is very likely 



288 Concerning Needless Fears. 

that one of the ten contains some rather disagree- 
able communication. You forget, in a minute, as 
you skim the newspaper and take your breakfast, 
what that disagreeable communication was. Yet 
still you take your breakfast with a certain weight 
upon your spirits : with a certain vague sense of 
something amiss. 

What is it that is wrong this Saturday evening, 
9.10 P.M. ? Nothing is wrong physically. Too 
thankful would this writer be, if he could but be 
assured that on all the Saturday evenings of his life 
he would be as happily placed as he is now. To- 
morrow he is to preach at his own church : and 
during the week all but gone, he hath prepared two 
new discourses to be preached on that day. Indu- 
rated must be that man's conscience, or very lightly 
must that man take his work, who does not feel a 
certain glow of satisfaction on the Saturday even- 
ing of a week wherein he has prepared two new 
discourses. You remark, I don't say two new ser- 
mons. No sensible mortal can prepare, or would try 
to prepare, two new sermons in one week. But he 
may prepare one sermon, and one lecture : which 
(being added one to the other) will be found to 
amount to two discourses. But any one who knows 
the long and hard work which goes to the produc- 
tion of a sermon which people may be expected to 
listen to, will feel, as he sews up his manuscript, 
the peculiar satisfaction which attends the con- 



Concerning Needless Fears. 289 

templation of * something attempted, something 
done.' 

Yes, I remember now. Something I thought of 
this morning has come with me all the day, making 
me feel gloomy even while forgetting what it was. 
You know how a severe sting from a nettle leaves 
behind it a certain starting pain, hours after the first 
heat of the sting is gone. So it was here. And in 
this, too, is a point of difference" between the ma- 
terial and moral world. In the material world, if a 
table stands on three legs, and you in succession saw 
off the three legs, the table goes down. But in the 
moral world (especially in the case of old women), 
if a belief, or a feeling, founds upon three reasons 
(or legs), though you in succession take away those 
reasons, the table often still stands as before. The 
physical table cannot do without legs. The moral 
table often stands firmest when it has no legs what- 
ever. The beliefs which men often hold most reso- 
lutely, are those for which not merely they can give 
no reason, but for which no reason could be given 
by anybody. 

I was thinking of the fears which eat the heart 
out of so many lives. And this was my reflec- 
tion. 

When I was a boy, there was exhibited in Lon- 
don what was called a Centrifugal Railway. Let 

u 



290 Concerning Needless Fears. 

me request you earnestly to attend to the subjoined 
diagram. 




The line A D C B represents the Centrifugal 
Railway. You started from the point A in a little 
carriage. It acquired a very great velocity in run- 
ning down the descent from A to D : a velocity so 
great that it ran right round the circle C, turning 
the passenger with his head downwards ; and finally, 
got safely to B. At the point B the passenger got 
out : and if he were a person of sense (which, under 
the circumstances, was by no means probable), he 
resolved never to travel by the Centrifugal Railway 
any more. 

Now, you observe that in turning the circle C the 
passenger was in a very critical position. He had 
good reason to be thankful when the circle was 
fairly turned ; and he had, with unbroken bones, 
reached B. And it struck me, that all our life here 
is like the circle C on the Centrifugal Railway. I 
shall be able to think differently in a day or two : 
more hopefully and cheerfully : but it was borne in 
upon me that after all, my friends, we are doing no 
more in this life than getting round the circle C : 
and that there are so many risks in the way, that 



Concerning Needless Fea^^s. 291 

we may be very glad and thankful when it is done. 
He was a wise man in former days who said (let me 
translate his words into my peculiar idiom) ' I call 
no man happy before he has got round the circle 
C And desponding times will come to all, in which 
they will think of the innumerable sad possibilities 
which hang over them, and the sorrowful certainties 
which are daily drawing nearer, and the dangers ©f 
getting off the line altogether and going to destruc- 
tion. I look ahead, many a one will sometimes be 
disposed to say : and there are many, many things 
.which I know may go wrong. Oh I would be 
thankful if I and those dear to me were safely 
round the circle C ; and had got safely to the point 
B : even though some people shrink from that 
latter point as long as they possibly can. 

Of course, this is a gloomy kind of view : but such 
views will sometimes push themselves upon one, and 
will not be put off. I hope it will go away shortly. 
It will go away all the sooner for my having made 
you partaker of it. I have in my mind an abstract 
eidolon, an image of the reader of this page ; who 
is my confidential friend. To him I have told very 
many things which I have hardly ever told to any 
one else. And I want him to take his share of this 
vexatious view about the circle C, that so it may lie 
lighter on myself. All this life, of push, struggle, 
privation, trickery) getting on, failure : all this life, 
in which one man becomes Chancellor, and another 



292 Concerning Needless Fears. 

Prime Minister, and another a weary careworn 
drudge, and another a self-satisfied blockhead, and 
another a poor needlewoman labouring eighteen 
hours a day for a few pence : all this life, of kings 
and priests and statesmen, of cripples and beggars, 
of joyful hearts and sorrowful hearts : of scheming 
and working, as if there were no other world — 
is no more than our getting round the circle C. 
We are cast on that incline that begins from A, at 
our birth ; and our business is, to get safely to B. 

Every day that dawns upon many people is a little 
circle C. In the morning they are aware that various 
things may go wrong in it ; and of course they do 
not know what the day may bring forth. We are 
environed by many unknown dangers ; and any 
day we may say the hasty word, or do the foolish 
thing, which may involve us in great trouble. Even 
the most sagacious and prudent man may some 
day be taken off his guard. And the accidents 
which may befall us are quite innumerable. It is a 
wonder we have got on so far in life as we have, 
so little battered by the chances of the way. You 
know some one who went out from his own home 
on a frosty day, and in three minutes came back 
pale and fainting, having fallen and fractured his 
wrist. The pain was great ; and the seclusion from 
work was absolute for awhile. What could we do 
if the like happened to us t Some one else thought 
but one step of a stair remained for him to descend. 



Concerning Needless Fears. 293 

while in fact there were two : and the consequences 
of that misapprehension remained with him pain- 
fully to the end of his life. And thus, looking back 
on last year, one feels it was a most protracted and 
perilous circle C. It was made up of days, each of 
which might have brought we know not what with 
it. We have got safely round that circle, indeed : 
but at the beginning we were not sure that we 
should. If we could have had such an assurance, 
it would have spared us many fears. These fears 
are for the most part forgot, when we look back ; 
and feel how needless they were. But they were 
very real things at the time they were felt ; and 
they were a terrible drawback from the pleasures 
of anticipation and of actual fact. When you look 
back on a few weeks or months of foreign travel, 
the whole thing has a fixed and certain look : the 
thing that has been is a thing for ever. But what 
a shifting tract of shadows it was, when you were 
looking forward to it ; and a tract not without 
several alarming spectres, vaguely stalking about 
over it Now we know that we got safely back : 
but when we started, we did not know that we 
should. It was like leaving the point A, and flying 
round the circle C : whereas now we have reached 
the point B, and we have forgot our emotions in 
actually flying round the circle. 

Two or three days ago, three friends of the writer 
sailed from Southampton, on their way to Egypt 



294 Concerning Needless Fears. 

and the Holy Land. They are to be away three 
months. They are experienced travellers, and have 
seen very many cities and men : and doubtless they 
started with no feelings but those of pleasurable 
anticipation. When I heard of their going my first 
feeling was one of envy. How delightful to cast 
aside all this perpetual toil, that overtasks one's 
strength, and keeps one ever on the stretch : and 
have three months for the mind to regain its elasti- 
city, much diminished by its being kept always 
bent ! And then, what strange, unfelt moods of 
thought and feeling one would experience, when 
surrounded by the scenes and associations of those 
tracts of this world ! You would accumulate store 
of new ideas and remembrances ; and in the first 
sermons and essays you would write after return- 
ing, you would be (in a moral sense) curveting about 
like a young colt in a pasture, and not plodding 
like an old steady hack along the highway ! But 
when I tried to put myself (in fancy) in the place 
of my friends : when I thought of the long, unknown 
way, and of the unsettled tribes of men : when I 
thought of Mr. Buckle at Damascus : when I thought 
of possible fevers and of most certain bugs : when I 
thought how when human beings go to the East for 
three months, they may chance never to come back 
at all : then to a quiet stay-at-home person, who 
has seen hardly anything, the circle C appeared 
invested with many grounds of alarm ; and I was 



Concerning Needless Fears. 295 

reconciled to the fact that I was not stepping on 
board the Ellora amid a great roar of escaping 
steam, nor going down to the choky httle berth, 
and surveying my belongings there. Thus did I 
repress the rising envy in my breast. But when 
my friends come back again, portentous images 
with huge beards : when they have made the Nile, 
and Olivet, and Gethsemane, and the Dead Sea, a 
possession for as long as memory ser\^es them : when 
they have got fairly and triumphantly round the 
circle C, and happily reached the point of safety 
B ; then, I fear, the envious feeling will recur. 

Oh, if we could but get quit of our needless 
fears ! Of those fears (that is) which take so much 
from the enjoyment of life, and which the result 
proves to have been quite groundless ! 

Some folk, with very robust ner\'ous systems, pro- 
bably know but little of these. But from large ex- 
perience of my fellow-creatures, rich and poor ; and 
from careful investigation of their features ; I begin 
to conclude that such fears are very common things. 
Most middle-aged faces have an anxious look. You 
can see, even when they bear a cheerful expression, 
that they are capable in a moment of taking that 
painful aspect of anxiety and apprehension. I do 
not mean by fear the indulgence of physical cowar- 
dice : happily few of the race that inhabits Britain 
will* on emergency, prove deficient in physical pluck. 



296 Concerning Needless Fears. 

But I mean that most middle-aged people, who have 
children, are somewhat cowed by the unknown 
Future : and that the too ready imagination can 
picture out a hundred things that may go wrong. 
Anxius vixi, wrote the man in the middle ages. 
And anxious we live yet ; and probably always will 
live, in this world. 

If you go out in the dark expecting to see a ghost, 
you will very likely take a white sheet hung on a 
hedge for one. And even so, people in their feverish 
state of apprehension sometimes are dreadfully 
frightened by things which in a calmer mood they 
would discern had nothing alarming about them. 
Every one is sharp enough to see this, in the case 
of other people. You will find a man who will say 
to you, ' What a goose Smith is to worry himself 
about that table-cloth on the holly, and declare it is 
an apparition, and that it has bad news for him : ' 
and in a few minutes you will be aware that the 
man who says all this, is furtively looking over his 
shoulder at a white donkey feeding under a thick 
hedge, and dreading that it is a polar bear about to 
devour him. 

It is curious to think how often these needless 
fears, which cause so much unnecessary anxiety and 
misery, are the result of pure miscalculation : and 
this miscalculation not made in a hurry, but deli- 
berately. I have a friend who told me this. When 
he was married, he had exactly 500/. a year, 'and 



Concerning Needless Fears. 297 

no means of adding to that income. So as he 
could not increase his income, his business was to 
keep down his expenditure below it. But neither 
he nor his wife knew much about household ma- 
nagement ; and (as he afterwards found) he was a 
good deal victimised by his servants. After doing 
all he could to economise, he found, at the end of 
the third month of his financial year, that he had 
spent exactly 125/. Four times 125/., he calculated, 
made 600/. a year, which was just 100/. more than 
he had got : so the debtor's prison appeared to 
loom in view ; or some total change in his mode of 
life, which it seemed almost impossible for him to 
make, without very painful circumstances. And 
for weeks, the thought almost drove him distracted. 
Day and night it never was absent. At length, 
one day, brooding over his prospects, he suddenly 
discovered that four times 125 make just 500, and 
not 600 : so that all his fears were groundless. He 
was relieved, he told me : but somehow his heart 
had been so burdened and sunk by those anxious 
weeks, that though the cause of anxiety was re- 
moved, it was a long time before it seemed to re- 
cover its spring. 

Now my friend had all his wits about him. There 
was nothing whatever of that causeless delusion 
which shades off into insanity. But somehow he 
thought that 125 x 4 = 600: and his conclusion 
was that ruin stared him in the face. 



298 Concerning Needless Fears. 

. I have heard of a more touching case. A certain 
man brought to a friend a sum of money, rather less 
than a hundred pounds ; and asked the friend to 
keep it for him. He said it was all he had in the 
world, and that he did not know what he was to do 
when it was gone. He had been a quite rich man ; 
but one of those swindling institutions whose direc- 
tors ought to be hung, and are not, had involved 
him in great money responsibilities by its downfall. 
In a few days after leaving the money with his 
friend, the poor man committed suicide. Then 
his affairs were examined by competent persons ; 
and it was found that after meeting all possible 
liabilities, he had been worth several hundreds a 
year. But the poor fellow had miscalculated : and 
here was the tragic consequence. 

No doubt, he had been so terribly apprehensive, 
that he had been afraid to make a thorough exami- 
nation as to how his affairs stood. Human beings 
often undergo much needless fear, because they are 
afraid to search out all the facts. For fear of find- 
ing the fact worse than they fear, they often fear 
what is much worse than the fact. They go on 
through life thinking they have seen a ghost, and 
miserable in the thought : whereas, if they had but 
screwed their courage to the point of examining, 
they would have found it was no more than a table- 
cloth drying upon a line between two poles. Oh 
that we could all, for ever, get rid of this moral 



Concerning Needless Fears. 299 

cowardice ! If you think there is something the 
matter with your heart, go to the doctor and let 
him examine. Probably there is nothing earthly 
wrong. And even if there be, it is better to know 
the worst than live on week after week in a vague 
wretched fear. Let us do the like with our affairs. 
Let us do the like with our religious difficulties : 
with our theological perplexities. The very worst 
thing you can do is to lock the closet door when 
you think probably there is a skeleton within. 
Fling it wide open : search with a paraffin lamp 
into every corner. A hundred to one, there is no 
skeleton there at all. But from youth to age, we 
must be battling with the dastardly tendency to 
walk away from the white donkey in the shadow, 
which we ought to walk up to. I have seen a little 
child, who had cut her finger, entreat that it might 
just be tied up, without ever being looked at : she 
was afraid to look at it. But when it was looked 
at, and washed and sorted, she saw how little a 
thing it was for all the blood that came from it : 
and about nine-tenths of her fear fled away. 

You have heard of Mr. Elwes, the wealthy miser, 
frightening a guest by walking into his bedroom 
during the night, and saying, ' Sir, I have just been 
robbed of seven guineas and a half, which was all 
I had in the world !' Here, of course, we enter the 
domain of proper insanity. For the fears which a 
man of vast fortune has lest he may die in the 



300 Concerning Needless Fears. 

workhouse, belong essentially to the same class 
with those of the man who thinks he is glass, and 
that if he falls he will break: or who thinks he is 
butter, and if he goes near the fire he will melt. 
And though all needless fears are morbid things, 
which the healthy mind would shake off, yet there 
is a vast distance between the morbid apprehensions 
and the morbid depressions of the practically sane 
man ; and the phenomena of the mind which is 
truly insane. 

The truth seems to be, that some people must 
have a certain amount of misery ; and it will attach 
itself to any peg. If not to this, then to another : 
but the misery is due. And I defy you by any 
means to lift such people above the slough of their 
apprehensions. As you remove each cause of alarm, 
they will fix upon another. First, they fear that 
their means will not carry them from year's end to 
year's end. That fear proves groundless. Next, 
they fear that though their present income is ample, 
somehow it will fall off. That fear proves ground- 
less. Next, they are in dread as to the provision 
for their children : and here, doubtless, most men 
can find a cause of anxiety that will last them 
through all their life. But it is their nature to be 
always imagining something horrible. They live 
in dread that they may quarrel with some friend ; 
or that some general crash will come some day, 



Concerning Needless Fears. 301 

they don't know how. And if all other causes of 
apprehension were absolutely removed, they would 
make themselves wretched to a suitable degree by 
fearing lest an earthquake should swallow up Great 
Britain ; or that Dr. Cumming's calculations as to 
the end of the world may prove true. In short, if 
a human being be of a nervous, anxious tempera- 
ment, it is as certain that such a human being will 
find some peg to hang his fears upon ; as it is that 
a man who is the possessor of a hat will find some- 
thing, wherever he goes, to hang it or lay it upon. 

All this seems to be especially true in the case 
of people who have been heavily tried in youth. 
Human beings may be subjected to a treatment in 
their early years that seems to take the hopeful 
spring out of them. Unless where there is very un- 
usual stamina of mind and body, they never quite 
get over it. You may damage a man so, that he 
will never quite get over it : you may give the 
youthful mind a wrench, whose evil effect will 
cling to it through all life. There are things in 
the moral world, which are like an injury to the 
spine, never recovered from ; but that grows and 
strengthens with the man's growth and strength. 
And no good fortune, no happiness, coming after- 
wards, can ever make amends. The evil has been 
done; and it cannot be undone. 

You have beheld a horse, no more than six years 
of age : but which is dull and spiritless, and its 



302 Concerning Needless Fears. 

forelegs somewhat bent and shaky. Why are these 
things so ? It has easy work now : good feeding : 
kind usage. Yes, but it was driven when too 
young. It was set to hard work then. And the 
creature never has got over it and never will. It 
is too late for any kindness now to make up for the 
mischief done at three years old. 

I am firmly persuaded it is so with many human 
beings. They had an unhappy home as little boys. 
The love of the beautiful in nature and art was 
starved out in them. They were committed to the 
care of a self-conceited person, utterly devoid of 
common sense. All mirth was forbidden, as some- 
thing sinful : life was made hard and savourless. 
They grew up under a bitter sense of injustice and 
oppression ; and with the conviction that they were 
hopelessly misunderstood. Or, later, the weight of 
care came down upon them very heavily. There 
are many people who, for most of the years between 
twenty and thirty, never know what a light heart 
is. And by such things as these the spring of the 
spirit is broken. A dogged stedfastness of pur- 
pose may remain : but the elasticity is gone. The 
writer has no knowledge of Mr. Thackeray's cha- 
racter and career, except from the accounts of these 
which have been published since his death by some 
who knew him well. But it is strongly impressed 
on one, in reading these, that amid all the success 
and fame and love of his latter years, a certain 



Concerning Needless Fears. 303 

tone of melancholy remained, testifying that former 
days, of unappreciated toil, of care and anxiety, 
had left a trace that never could go. It is only 
of a limited and exceptional order of troubles, that 
the memorable words can be spoken with any 
shade of truth : Forsan et hcEC olUn meminisse 
jicvabit. I do not believe that the memory of 
pure misery can ever be other than a miserable 
thing. 

If this were a sermon, I should now go on to set 
forth, at full length, what I esteem to be the best 
and worthiest means of getting free from those 
needless fears of which we have been thinking. 
But in this essay, I pass these briefly by for the 
present ; and proceed to suggest a lesser cure for 
needless anxiety, which is not without its whole- 
some effect on some minds. 

I believe that when you are worrying yourself 
by imagining all kinds of evils as likely to befall you, 
it will do you a great deal of good to be allowed 
to see something of other people who are always 
expecting something awful to happen, and with a 
morbid ingenuity devising w^ays of making them- 
selves miserable. You will discern how ridiculous 
such people look : how irritating they are : how so 
far from exciting sympathy, they excite indigna- 
tion. The Spartans were right to make their slaves 
drunk ; and thus to cure their children of the least 
tendency to the vice of drunkenness, by letting 



304 Concerning Needless Fears. 

them see how ugly it looks in another. I request 
Mr. Snarling to take notice, that when I say the 
Spartans were right in doing this, I don't mean to 
say that they did an act which is in a moral sense 
to be commended or justified. All I mean is, that 
they took a very effectual means to compass the 
end they had in view. You never feel the badness 
of your own faults so keenly, as when you see 
them, carried a little farther, in somebody else. 
And so a human being, naturally very nervous and 
evil-foreboding, is corrected, when he sees how 
absurd it looks in another. My friend Jones told 
me, that after several months of extremely hard 
head-work, which had lowered his nervous system, 
he found himself getting into a way of vaguely 
dreading what might come next ; and of receiving 
his letters in the morning with many anticipations 
of evil. But happily a friend came to visit him, 
who carried all this about a hundred degrees 
farther : who had come through all his life ex- 
pecting at least an earthquake daily, if not the end 
of the world. And Jones was set right. In the 
words of Wordsworth, * He looked upon him, and 
was calmed and cheered.' Jones saw how like a 
fool his friend seemed ; and there came a healthy 
reaction; and he opened his letter-box bravely 
every morning, and was all right again. Yes, let 
us see the Helot drunk; and it will teach us to 
keep sober. My friend Gray told me that for 



Concerning Needless Fears. 305 

some little space he felt a growing tendency to 
scrubbiness in money matters. But having wit- 
nessed pinching and paring (without the least need 
for them) carried to a transcendent degree by some 
one else, the very name of economy was made to 
stink in his nostrils ; and he felt a mad desire to 
pitch half-crowns about the streets wherever he 
went. In this case, the reaction went too far : but 
in a week or two Gray came back to the middle 
course, which is the safest and best. 

But, after all, the right and true way of escaping 
from w^hat Dr. Newman has so happily called 
^ care's unthankful gloom,' and of casting off need- 
less fears, lies in a different direction altogether. 
It was wise advice of Sydney Smith, when he said 
that those who desire to go hopefully and cheerfully 
through their work in this life, should ' take short 
view^s : ' not plan too far ahead : take the present 
blessing and be thankful for it. It was indeed the 
best of all possible advice : for it was but a repeti- 
tion, in another form, of the counsel of the Kindest 
and Wisest : ' Take therefore no thought for the 
morrow : for the morrow shall take thought for 
the things of itself: Sufficient unto the day is the 
evil thereof ' There is no doubt whatever, that 
the true origin of all these forebodings of evil, is 
our lack of trust in God. We all bear a far greater 
burden of anxiety than we need bear: just because 
we will try to bear our burden for ourselves, instead 

X 



3o6 Concerning Needless Fears, 

of casting it on a stronger arm. We try to provide 
for our children and ourselves : forgetting the sure 
promise to all humble Christian people, that '■ the 
Lord will provide.' And when we seek to cast off 
our load of care, by the help of those comfortable 
words of Holy Scripture which invite us to trust 
everything to God, we try too much to reason our- 
selves into the assurance that we need not be so 
care-laden as we are : we forget that the only way 
in which it is possible for us to believe these words 
in our heart, and to take the comfort of them, is by 
heartily asking God that they may be carried home 
to us with the irresistible demonstration of the 
Holy Spirit. How the circle C would lose its 
fears, if we did but feel, by His gracious teaching, 
that it is the way which God designed for us : and 
that He will ' keep us in all our ways ! ' When- 
ever I see man or woman, early old with anxiety, 
and with a face deeply lined with care, I think of 
certain words which deserve infinitely better than 
to be printed in letters of gold : and I wish that 
such a one, and that all I care for, were numbered 
among the people who have a right to take these 
words for their own : 

' Be careful for nothing : but in everything, by 
prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your 
requests be made known to God. And the peace of 
God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep 
your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.' 






?l*2^^f^^^ 



mmMi 






CHAPTER XIV. 

BE A TEN, 




O you know this peculiar feeling ? I speak 
to men in middle age. 
To be bearing up as manfully as you 
can : putting a good face on things : trying to per- 
suade yourself that you have done very fairly in life 
after all : and all of a sudden to feel that merciful 
self-deception fail you, and just to break down: to 
own how bitterly beaten and disappointed you are, 
and what a sad and wretched failure you have 
made of life ? 

There is no one in the world we all try so hard 
to cheat and delude, as ourself How we hoodwink 
that individual, and try to make him look at things 
through rose-coloured spectacles! Like the poor 
little girl in Mr. Dickens's touching story, we make 
believe very much. But sometimes we are not able 
to make believe. The illusion goes. The bare, 
unvarnished truth forces itself upon us : and we see 
what miserable little v/retches we are : how poor 



3o8 Beaten. 



and petty are our ends in life : and what a dull 
weary round it all is. You remember the poor old 
half-pay officer, of whom Charles Lamb tells us. 
He was not to be disillusioned. He asked you to 
hand him the silver sugar-tongs in so confident a 
tone, that though your eyes testified that it was but 
a teaspoon, and that of Britannia metal, a certain 
spell was cast over your mind. But rely on it, 
though that half-starved veteran kept up in this 
way before people, he would often break down 
when he was alone. It would suddenly rush upon 
him what a wretched old humbug he was. 

Is it sometimes so with all of us } We are none 
of us half-satisfied with ourselves. We know we 
are poor creatures, though we try to persuade our- 
selves that we are tolerably good. At least, if we 
have any sense, this is so. Yet I greatly envied a 
man whom I passed in the street yesterday; a 
stranger, a middle-aged person. His nose was ele- 
vated in the air : he had a supercilious demeanour, 
expressive of superiority to his fellow-creatures, and 
contempt for them. Perhaps he was a prince, and 
so entitled to look down on ordinary folk. Perhaps 
he was a bagman. The few princes I have ever 
seen, had nothing of his uplifted aspect. But what 
a fine thing it would be, to be able alw^ays to delude 
yourself with the belief that you are a great and 
important person : to be always quite satisfied with 
yourself, and your position. There are people who, 



Beaten. 309 



while repeating certain words in the litany, feel as 
if it was a mere form signifying nothing, to call 
themselves miserable sinners. There are some who 
say these words sorrowfully from their very heart ; 
feeling that they express God's truth. They know 
what weak, silly, sinful beings they are : they know 
what a poor thing they have made of life, with all 
their hard work, and all their planning and scheming. 
In fact, they feel beaten, disappointed, down. The 
high hopes with which they started, are blighted : 
were blighted long ago. They think, with a bitter 
laugh, of their early dreams of eminence, of success, 
of happiness. And sometimes, after holding up 
for a while as well as they could, they feel they 
can do it no longer. Their heart fails them. They 
sit down and give up altogether. Great men and 
good men have done it. It is a comfort to many a 
poor fellow to think of Elijah, beaten and sick at 
heart, sitting down under a scrubby bush at evening 
far in the bare desert, and feeling there was no 
more left, and that he could bear no more. Thank 
God that the verse is in the Bible. 

' But he himself went a day's journey into the 
wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper 
tree : and he requested for himself that he might 
die : and said, It is enough : now, O Lord, take 
away my life ; for I am not better than my fathers.' 

I thought of Elijah in the wilderness the other 
night. I saw the great prophet again. For human 



3 TO Beaten. 



nature is the same in a great prophet as in a poor 
little hungry boy. 

At nine o'clock on Saturday evening, I heard 
pitiful, subdued sobs and crying outside. I know 
the kind of thing that means some one fairly beaten. 
Not angry, not bitter: smashed. I opened the 
front-door: and found a little boy, ten years old, 
sitting on the steps, crying. I asked him what was 
the matter. I see the thin, white, hungry, dirty 
little face. He would have slunk away, if he could : 
he plainly thought his case beyond all mending. 
But I brought him in, and set him on a chair in 
the lobby : and he told his story. He had a large 
bundle of sticks in a ragged sack: firewood. At 
three o'clock that afternoon, he had come out to 
sell them. His mother was a poor washerwoman, 
in the most wretched part of the town : his father 
was killed a fortnight ago by falling from a scaffold. 
He had walked a long way through the streets: 
about three miles. He had tried all the afternoon 
to sell his sticks : but had sold only a halfpenny- 
worth. He was lame, poor little man, from a sore 
leg, but managed to carry his heavy load. But at 
last, going down some poor area stair in the dark, 
he fell down a whole flight of steps, and hurt his 
sore leg so that he could not walk, and also got a 
great cut on the forehead. He had got just the 
halfpenny for his poor mother : he had been going 
about with his burden for six hours, with nothing 



Beaten. 3 1 1 



to eat But he turned his face homewards, carrying 
his sticks : and struggled on about a quarter of a 
mile : and then he broke down. He could go no 
further. In the dark cold night, he sat down and 
cried. It was not the crying of one who hoped to 
attract attention : it was the crying of flat despair. 
The first thing I did (which did not take a mo- 
ment) was to thank God that my door-steps had 
been his juniper tree. Then I remembered that 
the first thing God did when Elijah broke down, 
was to give him something to eat. Yes, it is a 
great thing, to keep up physical nature. And the 
little man had had no food since three o'clock till 
nine. So there came, brought by kind hands (not 
mine) several great slices of bread and butter (jam 
even was added), and a cup of warm tea. The 
spirit began to come a little into the child. And 
he thought he could manage to get home if we 
would let him leave his sticks till Monday. We 
asked him what he would have got for his sticks if 
he had sold them all : ninepence. Under the cir- 
cumstances, it appeared that a profit of a hundred 
per cent, was not exorbitant : so he received eigh- 
teen pence, which he stowed away somewhere in 
his rags : and the sack went away, and returned, 
with all the sticks emptied out. Finally, an old 
gray coat of rough tweed came, and was put upon 
the little boy, and carefully buttoned : forming a 
capital great coat. And forasmuch as his trowsers 



312 Beaten. 



were most unusually ragged, a pair of such ap- 
peared, and being wrapped up, were placed in the 
sack, along with a good deal of bread and butter. 
How the heart of the child had by this time re- 
vived ! He thought he could go home nicely. 
And having very briefly asked the Father of the 
fatherless to care for him, I beheld him limp away 
in the dark. All this is supremely little to talk 
about. But it was quite a different thing to see. 
To look at the poor starved little face : and the 
dirty hand like a claw : to think of ten years old : 
to think of one's own children in their w^arm beds : 
to think what all this would have been to one's 
self as a little child. Oh, if I had a four-leaved 
shamrock, what a turn-over there should be in this 
world ! 

When the little man went away, I came back to 
my work. I took up my pen, and tried to write ; 
but I could not. I thought I saw many human 
beings besides Elijah in the case of that child. I 
tried to enter into the feeling (it was only too easy) 
of that poor little thing in his utter despair. It was 
sad enough, to carry about the heavy bundle hour 
after hour, and to sell only the half-penny worth. 
But it was dreadful, after tumbling down the stair, 
to find he was not able to walk ; and still to be 
struggling to carry back his load to his bare home, 
which was two miles distant from this spot. And 
at last to sit down in misery on the step in the 



Beaten. 3 1 3 



dark night, stunned. He would have been quite 
happy if he had got ninepence, God help him. 
When I was a boy, I remember how a certain per- 
son who embittered my life in those days was wont 
to say, as though it summed up all the virtues, that 
such a person was a man v/ho looked at both sides 
of a shilling before spending it. It is such a sight 
as the little boy on the step that makes one do 
the like : that helps one to understand the power 
there is in a shilling. But many human beings, 
who can give a shilling rather than take it, are as 
really beaten as the little boy. They too have got 
their bags, filled with no matter what. Perhaps 
poetry, perhaps metaphysics, perhaps magazine 
articles, perhaps sermons. They thought they 
would find a market, and sell these at a great profit : 
but they found none. They have fallen down a 
stair ; and broken their leg and bruised their head. 
And now, in a moral sense, they have sat down in 
the dark on a step : and though not crying, are 
gazing about them blankly. 
Perhaps you are one of them. 




CHAPTER XV. 
GOSSIP. 




HO invents the current lies ? I suppose 
a multitude of people give each their 
little contribution, till the piece of malig- 
nant tattle is formed into shape. 

There are many people, claiming to be very re- 
ligious people, who are very willing to repeat a 
story to the prejudice of some one they know: 
though they have very little reason to think it true, 
and have strong suspicions that it is false. There 
is a lesser number of respectable people, who 
will positively invent and retail a story to the 
prejudice of some one they know, being well aware 
that it is false. In short, most people who repeat 
ill-natured stories may be arranged in these two 
classes : 

1. People who lie : 

2. People who lie, and know they lie. 

The intelligent reader is requested to look upon 
the words which follow : and then he will be 



Gossip. 3 1 5 

informed about a malicious, vulgar, and horribly 
stupid piece of gossip. 

Mr. and Mrs. Green 

ALWAYS 

Dress for Dinner. 

My friend Mr. Green lately told me, that quite 
by accident, he found that in the little country 
town where he lives, and of which indeed he is the 
Vicar, it had come to be generally reported that in 
every bedroom in his house, a framed and glazed 
placard was hung above the mantelpiece, bearing 
the above inscription. Miss Tarte and Mr. Fatuous 
had eagerly disseminated the rumour, though it 
was impossible to say who had originated it. Pro- 
bably Miss Tarte had one day said to Mr, Fatuous 
that Mr. Green ought to have such a placard so 
exhibited ; and that some day Mr. Green probably 
would come to have such a placard so exhibited. 
A few days afterwards Mr. Fatuous said to Miss 
Tarte that he supposed Mr. Green must have 
his placards up by this time. And next day, on 
the strength of that statement. Miss Tarte told 
a good many people that the placards were 
actually up. And the statement was willingly re- 
ceived and eagerly repeated by those persons in 
that town who are always delighted to have some- 
thing to tell which shows that anyone they know 
has done something silly or bad. At last, a friend 



3 1 6 Gossip. 

of Mr. Green's thought it right he should know 
what Mr. Fatuous and Miss Tarte were saying. 
And Mr. Green, who is a resolute person, took 
means to cut these individuals short. My friend 
has exactly one spare bedroom in his house : and 
no one who is not an idiot need be told that no 
such inscription was ever displayed or ever dreamt 
of in his establishment. Next Sunday Mr. Green 
preached a sermon from the text. Thou shalt 7iot 
bear false witness against thy neighhour. And 
after pointing out that it was unnecessary that the 
commandment should forbid false witness to the 
advantage of one's neighbour, inasmuch as nobody 
was likely ever to bear that : he went on to point out, 
with great force of argument, that if man or w^oman 
habitually told lies to the prejudice of their neigh- 
bours, their Christian character might justly be held 
as an imperfect one, even though they should attend 
all the week-day services and missionary society 
meetings within several miles. Mr. Fatuous and 
Miss Tarte complained that this was very unsound 
doctrine. And Miss Tarte wrote a letter to the 
Record, in which she stated that the vicar habitually 
preached the doctrines of Bishop Colenso. 

One is most unwilling to believe it; yet I am 
compelled by the logic of facts to think that malice 
towards all their fellow-creatures is an essential 
part of the constitution of many people. All the 
particles of matter, we know, exert on each other 



Gossip. 3 1 7 

a mutual repulsion. Is it so with the atoms that 
make up human society ? Many people dislike a 
man, just because they know nothing about him. 
And when they come to know something about 
him, they are sure to dislike him even more. In a 
simple state of society, if you disliked a man, you 
would knock him on the head. If an Irishman, 
you would shoot him from behind a hedge. The 
modern civilised means of wTeaking your wrath on 
the man you dislike, is different. You repeat tattle 
to his prejudice. You tell lies about him. This is 
the weapon of warfare in Christian countries. Two 
things there are the wise man will not trust, if said 
by various persons we all know : 

1. Anything to their own advantage : 

2. Anything to their neighbour's prejudice. 

It is a bad sign of human nature, that many 
men should have so much to say to the prejudice 
of anyone they know. But it is a much worse 
sign of human nature, that many men should hear 
with delight, and speak with exaggeration, anything 
to the prejudice of people whom they know nothing 
about. The man you know may have given you 
offence. The man of whom you know nothing 
cannot possibly have done so. And if you hate 
him, and wish to do him harm, it can only be be- 
cause you are prepared to hate the average speci- 
men of your race. We all know those who, if they 
met a fellow-creature out in the lonely desert, 



3 1 8 Gossip. 

would see in him not a friend but an enemy; and 
would prepare to shoot him, or hamstring him 
unobserved. For the people I mean prefer to 
deal their blow unseen. There are those who, as 
boys at school, would never have a fair fight with 
a companion : but would secretly give him a ma- 
licious poke, when unobserved. And such men, I 
have remarked, carry out the system when they 
have reached maturity. They will not boldly face 
the being they hate ; but they secretly disseminate 
falsehoods to his disadvantage. 
, But it is sad to think that the hasty judgments 
men form of one another are almost invariably un- 
favourable ones. It is sad to think that people come 
to have such malignant feeling towards other people 
who are quite unknown to them. A short time ago, 
at a public meeting, Mr. Jones was proposed as a 
suitable person to be the town Beadle. Jones did 
not want the Beadleship, being already in possession 
of a preferable situation of the same character. 
When his name was proposed, an old individual 
rose to oppose him. That was all natural. But 
this individual was not content to oppose Jones's 
claims to the Beadleship. He positively gnashed 
his teeth in fury at Jones. He had no command of 
language, and could but imperfectly express his 
hatred ; but he foamed at the mouth, the veins of 
his head swelled up, and he trembled in every limb 
with eager wrath, as he declared that he would 



Gossip. 319 

never consent to Jones being Beadle : that if Jones 
was appointed Beadle, he himself (his name was 
Mr. Curre) would forthwith quit the town and never 
again enter it. Curre had never exchanged a word 
with Jones in all his life. Yet he hated Jones : and 
the mention of Jones's name thus infuriated him, 
even as a scarlet rag a bull. Poor Curre was not a 
bad-hearted fellow, after all : and at a subsequent 
period Jones made his acquaintance. Now one 
great principle which Jones holds by is this : that 
if any man hate you, it must be in some measure 
your own fault : you must in some way have given 
offence to the man. So Jones, who is a very genial 
and straightforward person, asked Curre to tell him 
honestly why he had so keenly opposed his appoint- 
ment to the Beadleship : adding that he feared he 
had given Curre offence in some way or other, 
though he had never intended it. And Curre, after 
some hesitation, and with a good deal of shame, 
replied, ' Well, the fact is, I could not bear to see 
you riding such a fine horse : and Mr. Sneakyman 
told me you paid a hundred and twenty pounds for 
it.' * My friend Curre,' was the reply, ' I gave just 
forty for that horse: and how could you believe 
anything said by Sneakyman .? ' Curre assured Jones 
that the reason why he had disliked him was just 
that he knew so little of him : and that when he 
came to know him, his dislike immediately passed 
into a real warm and penitent regard. And when 



320 Gossip. 

Curre died soon after, he left Jones ten thousand 
pounds. Curre had no relations : so it was all right. 
And Jones had nineteen children: so it was all 
right for him too. 

Reader, take a large sheet of paper: foolscap 
paper. 

Take a pen. Sit down at a table where there is 
ink. 

Write out a list of all the persons you dislike : 
adding a brief statement of the reason or reasons 
why you dislike each of them. 

. Having written accordingly, ask yourself this 
question : Am I doing well to be angry with these 
persons } Have they given me offence to justify 
this dislike } 

And now, listen to this prophecy. You will be 
obliged to confess that they have not. You will 
feel ashamed of your dislike for them. You will 
resolve to cease disliking them. 

Believe one who has tried. Here, on this table, 
is a large foolscap page. Three names did I write 
down of people I disliked. Then I wrote down the 
cause why I disliked the first. And it looked, 
being written down, so despicably small, that I felt 
heartily ashamed. And now, you large page, go 
into the fire : and with you, these dislikes shall 
perish. At this moment, I don't dislike any human 
being : and if anybody dislikes me, I hope he will 
cease doing so. If ever I gave him ofTencC; I am 
sorry for it. 



Gossip. 3 2 T 

Yet I cannot quite agree with Jones in thinking 
that in every case where dishke is felt, it is at least 
in part the fault of the disliked person. In many 
cases it is : not in all. A retired oilman of large 
wealth, bought a tract of land, and went to reside 
on it. He found that his parish clergyman drove a 
handsome carriage, and had a couple of men-ser- 
vants. The old oilman was infuriated. The clergy- 
man's wife erected a conservatory : the oilman had 
an epileptic fit. Now all this was entirely the 
oilman's own fault. A retired officer went to live 
in a certain rural district. He dined at six o'clock. 
Several people round, who dined at five, took mor- 
tal offence. Oh for the abolition of white slavery ! 
When will human beings be suffered to do as they 
please t 

I have remarked, too, that most stupid people 
hate all clever people. I have witnessed a very 
weak and silly man repeat, with a fatuous and 
feeble malignity, like a dog without teeth trying to 
bite, some story to the prejudice of an eminent man 
in the same profession. And even worse : you may 
find such a man repeat a story not at all to the dis- 
advantage of the eminent man, under the manifest 
impression that it is to his disadvantage. I have 
rarely heard Mr. Snarling say anything with more 
manifest malignity, than when he said that my 
friend Smith had. bought a fire-proof safe in which 
to keep his sermons. Well, was there any harm in 

Y 



32 2 Gossip. 

that ? ' Bedwell said he would take nothing under 
the chancellorship,' said Mr. Dunup. Perhaps Bed- 
well should not have said so : but the fact proved 
to be that he got the chancellorship. 

Clergymen of little piety or ability, and with 
empty churches, dislike those clergymen whose 
churches are very full. You may discern this un- 
worthy feeling exhibited in a hundred pitiful spite- 
ful little ways. I have remarked, too, that the 
emptier a man's church grows, the higher becomes 
his doctrine. And flagrant practical neglect of duty 
is in some cases compensated by violent orthodoxy: 
the orthodoxy being shown mainly by accusing 
other people of heterodoxy. 

Unworthy people hate those who do a thing 
better than themselves. An inefficient rector emp- 
ties his church. He gets a popular curate who fills 
it. The parishioners present the curate with a piece 
of plate. Forthwith the rector dismisses the curate. 
Or perhaps the rector dare not venture on that. 
He waits till the curate gets a parish of his own : 
and then he diligently excludes him from the pulpit 
whence his sermons were so attractive. His old 
friends shall never see or hear him again, if the 
rector can prevent it. And further, the rector and 
his wife disseminate wretched little bits of scandal 
as to the extravagant sayings and doings of the 
curate, all exaggerated and mostly invented. 

The heroic way of taking gossip, is that in which 



Gossip. 323 

the old Earl Marlschals took It, when it was a 
more serious thing than now. Above the door of 
each of their castles, there were written on the stone 
these words : 

They haif sayd: 
Qhat sayd they? 
Lat them say! 





CHAPTER XVL 

CONCERNING CUTTING AND CARVING 

WITH SOME THOUGHTS ON TAMPERING 
WITH THE COIN OF THE REALM. 




BEHELD, as in a Vision, the following 

remarkable circumstances : 

There was a large picture, by that 
great artist Mr. Q. R. Smith, hung up in a certain 
public place. It appeared to me that the locality 
partook of the nature of a market-place in a popu- 
lous city : and numbers of human beings beheld 
the picture. A little vulgar boy passed, and looked 
at it : his words were these : * My eye ! Ain't it 
spicy } Rather ! ' A blooming maiden gazed upon it : 
and her remark was as follows : ' Sweetly pretty ! ' 
But a man who had long painted wagons for 
agricultural purposes, and who had recently painted 
a signboard, after looking at the picture for a little, 
began to improve it with a large brush, heavily 
loaded with coarse red and blue, such as are used 
for painting wagons. Another man came, a house- 



Concerning Cutting and Carving. 325 

painter : and he touched the picture in several parts, 
with a brush filled with that white material which 
is employed for finishing the ceiling of rooms which 
are not very carefully finished. These persons, 
though horribly spoiling the picture, did honestly 
intend to improve it; and they fancied they had 
much improved it. Finally there came a malicious 
person, who was himself an artist ; and who envied 
and hated the first artist for painting so well. As 
for this man, he busied himself upon the principal 
figure in the picture. He made its eyes horribly to 
squint. He put a great excrescence on its nose. 
He painted its hair a lively scarlet. And having 
hideously disfigured the picture, he wrote beneath 
it, Q. R. Smith pinxit. And he pointed out the 
canvas to all his friends, saying, ' That's Smith's 
picture : isn't it beautiful t ' 

Into this Vision I fell, sitting by the evening fire. 
The immediate occasion of this Vision was, that I 
had been reading a little volume, prettily printed 
and nicely bound, purporting to be The Childreiis 
Garland from the Best Poets, selected and arranged 
by Coventry Patmore. There I had been pleasantly 
reviving my recollection of many of the pieces, 
which I had been taught to read and repeat as a 
boy at school. And as I read, a sense of wonder 
grew, gradually changing to a feeling of indigna- 
tion. I said to myself (speaking hastily and un- 
justly, as people do), Surely Mr. Coventry Patmore's 



326 Concerning Ctttting arid Carving. 

modesty has led him to take credit on his title-page 
for much less than he deserves. He has not merely 
selected and arranged these pieces from the Best 
Poets : he has also (according to his own ideas) 
improved them. We have (I thought) in this vo- 
lume, the picture of Q. R. Smith, touched up with 
red and whitewash, and having the eyes and nose 
altered by the painter of signboards. Or to speak 
more accurately, in reading this volume, we are 
requested to walk through a gallery of paintings by 
great masters, almost all improved, in many places, 
by the same painter of wagon-wheels, with the 
same large brush filled with coarse red. As we go 
on with the book, we come upon some poem which 
we have known all our lives : and every word of 
which is treasured and sacred in our memory. But 
we are made to feel that this is indeed our old 
friend : but his nose is cut off, and one of his eyes 
is put out. Such was my first hasty and unjust 
impression. Every poem of those I remembered 
from childhood, had a host of verbal variations from 
the version in which I knew it. In Southey's 
well-known verses about The Bell on the hichcape 
Rock, I counted thirty-seven. There were a good 
many in Campbell's two poems ; one called The 
Parrot, and the other about Napoleon and the 
British sailor. So with Cowper's Royal Geoj^ge : so 
with Macaulay's A rmada. So with Scott's Yomtg 
Lochinvar : so with Byron's DestriLction of Sen- 



Concerning Cutting and Carving. 327 

nacherib : so with Wordsworth's poem as to the 
dog that watched many weeks by his dead master 
on Helvellyn : so with Goldsmith's Good people all, 
of every sort : so with Mrs. Hemans' Graves of a 
Household. Mr. Patmore tells us in his Preface, 
that ' in a very few instances he has ventured to 
substitute a word or phrase, where that of the 
author has made the piece in which it occurs unfit 
for children's reading.' But on my first reading of 
his book, it appeared that he had made alterations 
by scores, most of them so trivial as to be very 
irritating. But I proceeded to investigate. I com- 
pared Mr. Patmore's version of each poem, with 
the version of each poem contained in the last 
edition of its author's works. And though I found 
a few variations, made apparently through careless 
transcribing : and though I was annoyed by con- 
siderable disregard of the author's punctuation and 
capitals; still it appeared that in the main Mr. 
Patmore gives us the pieces as their authors left 
them : while the versions of them, given in those 
books which are put into the hands of children, 
have in almost every case been touched up by no- 
body knows whom. So that when Mr. Patmore's 
book falls into the hands of men who made their 
first acquaintance with many of the pieces it con- 
tains, in their schoolboy days ; and who naturally 
prefer the version of them which is surrounded by 
the associations of that season : Mr. Patmore will 



328 Concerning Ctctting and Carving, 

be unjustly accused of having cut and carved upon 
the dear old words. Whereas, in truth, the present 
generation has reason to complain of having been 
introduced to the wrong things in youth : so that 
now we cannot rightly appreciate the right things. 
And for myself, my first unjust suspicion of Mr. 
Patmore, speedily dispelled by investigation, led me 
to many thoughts upon the whole subject of literary 
honesty and dishonesty in this matter. 

It seems to me quite essential that a plain prin- 
ciple of common faithfulness should be driven into 
those persons who edit and publish the writings of 
other men. If you pretend to show us Raphael's 
picture, let it be exactly as Raphael left it. But if 
your purpose be to exhibit the picture as touched 
up by yourself, do not mendaciously call the picture 
a Raphael. Call it what it is : to wit, Raphael 
altered and improved by Snooks. If you take a 
sovereign, and drill several holes in it, and fill them 
up with lead, you will be made to feel, should you 
endeavour to convey that coin into circulation, that 
though you may sell it for what it is worth as a 
sovereign plugged with lead, you had better not try 
to pass it off upon people as a genuine sovereign. 
All this is as plain as may be. But there are 
many collectors and editors of little poems, who 
take a golden piece by Goldsmith, Wordsworth, 
Campbell, or Moore : and punch out a word here 
and there, and stick in their own miserable little 



Concerning Cutting and Carving. 329 

plug of pinchbeck. And then, having thus debased 
the coin, they have the impudence to palm it off 
upon the world with the superscription of Gold- 
smith, Wordsworth, Campbell, or Moore. It is 
needful, I think, that some plain principles of 
literary honesty should be instilled into cutting 
and carving editors. Even Mr. Palgrave, in his 
Golden Treasury, is not free from some measure of 
blame ; though his sins are as nothing compared 
with those of the editors of school collections and 
volumes of sacred poetry. Mr. Palgrave has not 
punched out gold to stick in pinchbeck : but in one 
or two glaring instances, he has punched out gold 
and left the vacant space. Every one knows that 
exquisite little poem of Hood's, The Death Bed. 
That poem consists of four stanzas. Mr. Palgrave 
gives us in his book a poem which he calls The 
Death Bed; and puts at the end of it the honoured 
name of Hood. But it is not Hood's Death Bed ; 
any more than a sovereign with one half of it cut 
off would be a true sovereign. Mr. Palgrave gives 
us just two stanzas : Hood's first and last ; leaving 
out the two intermediate ones. In a note, whose 
tone is much too confident for my taste, Mr. Pal- 
grave attempts to justify this tampering with the 
coin of the realm. He says that the omitted 
stanzas are very ingenious, but that ingenuity is not 
in accordance with pathos. But what we want is 
Hood with his own peculiar characteristics : not 



3 30 Concerning Cutting and Carving. 

Hood with the corners rubbed off to please even so 
competent a critic as Mr. Palgrave. In my judg- 
ment, the two omitted stanzas are eminently cha- 
racteristic of Hood. I do not think they are very 
ingenious : they express simple and natural feel- 
ings : and they are expressed with a most touching 
and pathetic beauty. And on the whole, if you 
are to give the poem to the world as Hood's, they 
seem to have an especial right to stand in it. If 
you give a picture of a bison, surely you should 
give the hump : even though you may think the 
animal would be more graceful without it. We 
want to have the creature as God made it : with 
the peculiarities God gave it. 

The poems which are cut and carved to the 
extremest degree, are hymns. There is indeed 
some pretext of reason here: for it is necessary 
that hymns should be made, in respect of the doc- 
trines they set forth, to fit the views of the people 
who are to sing them. Not that I think that this 
justifies the practice of adulterating the text. But 
in the few cases where a hymn has been altered so 
completely as to become virtually a new composi- 
tion; and a much better composition than it was 
originally : and where the authorship is a matter 
really never thought of by the people who devoutly 
use the hymn; something is to be said for this 
tampering. For the hymn is not set forth as a 
poem written by this man or that : but merely as a 



( 



Concerning Cittting, and Carving. 331 

piece which many hands may have brought into its 
present shape ; and which in its present shape suits 
a specific purpose. You don't daub Raphael's 
picture with wagon paint ; and still exhibit it as a 
Raphael. You touch it up according to your pecu- 
liar views : and then exhibit it saying merely, Is 
not that a nice picture t It is nobody's in particular. 
It is the joint doing of many men, and perhaps of 
many years. But where hymns are presented in a 
literary shape, and as the productions of the men 
who wrote them, the same law of honesty applies 
as in the case of all other literary work. I observe, 
with very great satisfaction, that in the admirable 
Book of Praise lately published by Sir Roundell 
Palmer, that eminent lawyer has made it his rule 
^ to adhere strictly in all cases in which it could be 
ascertained, to the genuine uncorrupted text of the 
authors themselves.' And Sir Roundell Palmer 
speaks with just severity of the censurable, but 
almost universal practice of tampering with the 
text. 

I confess that till I examined Mr. Patmore's 
volume, I had no idea to what an extent this lite- 
rary clipping of the coin had gone, even in the 
matter of poetry for clipping and altering which 
there is no pretext of reason. It appears to me a 
duty, in the interest of truth, to protest against this 
discreditable cutting and carving. There are various 
editors of school-books, and other collections of 



332 Concerning Cutting a7td Carving. 

poetry for the young, who seem incapable of giving 
the shortest poem by the greatest poet, without im- 
proving it here and there with their red brush. No 
statue is presented to us without first having its 
nose knocked off. And of course there is no neces- 
sity here for squaring the poems to some doctrinal 
standard. It is a pure matter of the editor's thinking 
that he can improve the compositions of Campbell, 
Wordsworth, Moore, Goldsmith, Southey, Scott, 
Byron, Macaulay, or Poe. So that in the case of 
every one of these manifold alterations the question 
is just this simple one : Whether Wordsworth or 
some pushing Teacher of Elocution is the best 
judge of what Wordsworth should say: whether 
we are to hold by these great poets, believing that 
they most carefully considered their most careful 
pieces ; or to hold by anybody who chooses to alter 
them. There is something intensely irritating in 
the idea of Mr. Smith, with his pencil in his hand, 
sitting down with a volume of Wordsworth, every 
word in every line of which was carefully considered 
by the great poet, and stands there because the 
great poet thought it the right word ; and jauntily 
altering a word here and there. The vision still 
returns to me of the sign-painter touching up 
Raphael. But I have no doubt whatsoever that 
Mr. Smith or Mr. Brown thinks himself quite equal 
to improving Wordsworth. The self-sufficiency of 
human beings is wonderful. I have heard of a man 



Co7icer7iing Chitting and Ca7'ving. 



O J J 



who thought he could improve things better than 
anything of Wordsworth's. Probably you never 
heard of the youthful Scotch divine who lived in 
days when stupid bigotry forbade the use of the 
Lord's Prayer in the pulpits of the Scotch Church. 
That young divine went to preach for an aged 
clergyman who was somewhat wiser than his gene- 
ration : and who accordingly told the young divine 
in the vestry before ser\'ice that the Lord's Prayer 
was habitually used in that church. ' Is it necessary,' 
said the young divine, ' that I should use the Lord's 
Prayer.^' 'Not at all,' replied the aged clergyman, 
'if you can use anything better.' But the young 
divine was true to his party : and he used certain 
petitions of his own, which he esteemed as im- 
provements on the Lord's Prayer. 

You may be quite sure that in the compositions 
of any careful writer, you could not alter many 
words without injury to the writer's style. You 
could make few alterations which the writer would 
approve. In a careful style, rely on it there was 
some appreciable reason present to the author's 
mind for the employment of almost every word ; 
and for each word's coming in just where it does. 
This is true even of prose. And I should fancy 
that few men would long continue to write for any 
periodical the editor of which was wont to cut and 
carve upon their articles. You remember how bit- 
terly Southey used to complain of the way in which 



334 Concerning Cutting and Carving. 

Lockhart altered his. But all this holds good with 
infinitely greater force in the case of poetry : espe- 
cially in the case of such short gems as many of 
those in Mr. Patmore's volume. The prose writer, 
however accurate, covers his pages a day: each 
sentence is carefully weighed ; but weighed rapidly. 
But the poet has lingered long over every word in 
his happiest verse. How carefully each phrase has 
been considered : how each phrase is fitted to all 
the rest ! I declare it seems to me, there is some- 
thing sacred in the best stanzas of a great poet. It 
is profanation to alter a word. And you know, 
how, to the sensitively strung mind and ear of the 
author a single wrong note makes discord of the 
whole: the alteration of a word here and there, 
may turn the sublime to the ridiculous. And such 
alterations may be made in all good faith, by people 
whose discernment is not sharpened to this par- 
ticular use. There was a pretty song, popular some 
years ago, which was called What are the wild 
waves saying ? The writer had many times heard 
that song : but he hardly recognised its name when 
he heard it once asked for by the title of What are 
the mad waves roaring f Let us have the poet's 
work as he left it. You do not know how painfully 
the least verbal alteration may jar upon a sensitive 
ear. I hold that so sacred is the genuine text of a 
great poet, that even to the punctuation ; and the 
capital letters, however eccentric their use may be ; 



Concerning Ctitting and Carving. 335 

it should be esteemed as sacrilege to touch it. Let 
me say here that no man who does not know the 
effect upon poetry of little typographical features is 
fit to edit any poet. It seems to me, that Mr. 
Coventry Patmore fails here. It is plain that he 
does not perceive, with the sensitiveness proper to 
the editor of another man's poetry, what an effect 
upon the expression of a stanza or a line is produced 
by typographical details. Mr. Patmore not unfre- 
quently alters the punctuation which the authors 
(we may suppose) adopted after consideration ; and 
which has grown, to every true reader of poetry, as 
much a part of the stanza as its words are. Every 
one knows how much importance Wordsworth 
attached to the use of capital letters. Now, in the 
poem entitled Fidelity {Childreiis Garland, p. 248) 
Mr. Patmore has at nine different places substituted 
a small letter for Wordsworth's capital : consider- 
ably to the destruction of the expression of the 
piece : and at any rate, to the clipping of the coin 
Wordsworth left us. In the last verse of Poe's 
grand poem, The Raven, Mr. Patmore has, in six 
lines, madej'zz/^ alterations: one quite uncalled for; 
four for the worse. Poe wrote demon : Mr. Patmore 
chooses to make it dceinon: Poe wrote ' the shadow 
that lies floating on the floor:' Mr. Patmore sub- 
stitutes is for lies : to the detriment of the sense. 
And Poe ends the stanza thus : 



33^ Concerning Ctttting and Carving. 

And my soul from out that shadow that hes floating on the 
floor 
Shall be lifted — nevermore ! 

It is extraordinary how many variations for the 
worse Mr. Patmore introduces into the last line. 
He makes it, 

Shall be lifted ' Nevermore/ 

I St. The dash before the nevermore is omitted : 
a loss. 

2nd. The Nevermore is made to begin with a 
capital : which though very right in preceding 
stanzas, is here absurd. 

3rd. The Nevermore is marked as a quotation : 
which it is not. It is one in the preceding stanzas, 
and is properly marked as one : but here the mark 
of quotation is wrong. 

4th. Poe puts, most fitly, a mark of exclamation 
after the nevermore! If ever there was a stanza 
which should end with that point, it is here. But 
Mr. Patmore, for no earthly reason, leaves it out. 

Now, some folk may say these are small matters. 
I beg to say that they are not small matters to any 
accurate reader : and above all, to any reader with 
an eye for the expression of poetry. And no man, 
who has not an eye for these minute points, and 
who does not feel their force, is fit for an editor of 
poetry. I am quite sure that no mortal, with an 
eye for such niceties, will deny, that each of Mr. 
Pat more' s/<?^/r alterations of one line of Poe, is an 



Concerning Cutting and Carving. 337 

alteration for the worse. I have taken as the pro- 
per representation of Poe, the best American edition 
of his whole works, in four volumes. But if you look 
at the beautiful little edition of his poems, edited by 
Mr. Hannay, you will find that the accurate scholar 
has given that stanza exactly as the American 
edition gives it : and of course, exactly right. If 
Mr. Patmore does not understand how indescribably 
irritating these little cuttings and carvings are to a 
careful reader or writer, he is not the man to edit 
the Childreiis Garland^ or any other collection of 
poetry. Every one can imagine the indignation 
with which Wordsworth the scrupulous and Poe the 
minutely accurate would have learned that their 
best poems were, either through carelessness, or 
with the design of making them better, altered by 
Mr. Patmore, even in the matter of capital letters 
and points : and that finally the result was to be 
exhibited to the world, not as Raphael touched up 
by Smith the sign-painter, but as Raphael pure and 
genuine. 

And while thus fault-finding at any rate, I am 
obliged to say that though acquitting Mr. Patmore 
of any vain-glorious purpose of improving those 
Best Poets from whom he has selected his Garland^ 
I cannot acquit him of culpable carelessness in a 
good many instances. Though he may not have 
smeared the great, master's picture with red paint, 
he has not been sufficiently careful to present the 

z 



33^ Concernmg Cutting and Carving. 

picture to us unsmeared by anybody else. Except 
in those ' very few instances ' in which he has 
changed a word or phrase '■ unfit for children's read- 
ing/ we have a right to expect an accurate version 
of the text. But it is quite easy to point out in- 
stances in which Mr. Patmore's reading could not 
have been derived from any edition of the poet, 
however bad : nor can any one say that Mr. Pat- 
more's reading is an improvement upon the textus 
receptus. The third and fourth lines of Macaulay's 
poem, The A rmada, run as follows : 

When that great fleet invincible against her bore in vain 
The richest spoils of Mexico, the stoutest hearts of Spain, 

Mr. Patmore makes two alterations in these lines. 
For that great fleet he reads the great fleet, to the 
detriment alike of rhythm and meaning. And for 
the richest spoils of Mexico, he reads the richest 
stores. It is extremely plain that spoils is a much 
better word than stores. It was not the stores of 
Mexico ; that is, the wealth stored up in Mexico ; 
that the Armada bore. It was the spoils of 
Mexico ; that is, the wealth which the Spaniards 
had taken away from Mexico ; that the Armada 
bore. It is possible that the Spaniards may have 
taken away all the wealth of Mexico: in which 
case the spoils and the stores would coincide in fact. 
But they would still be totally different in con- 



Concerning Cutting and Carving. 339 

ception ; and so exact a writer as Macaulay would 
never confound the two things. 

Next, let us turn to Campbell's touching verses 
entitled The Parrot. Campbell put at the top of 
his verses the words, The Parrot : a domestic A nec- 
dote. Mr. Patmore puts the words. The Parrot : a 
true Story. The poem tells us, very simply and 
beautifully, how a certain parrot, which in its early 
days had been accustomed to hear the Spanish 
language spoken, was brought to the island of 
Mull : w^here, we may well suppose, it heard no 
Spanish. It lived in Mull for many years, till its 
green and gold changed to grey : till it grew blind 
and apparently dumb. But let the story be told in 
the poet's words : 

At last, when blind and seeming dumb, 

He scolded, laugh'd, and spoke no more, 
A Spanish stranger chanced to come 

To Mulla's shore 
He hail'd the bird in Spanish speech, 

The bird in Spanish speech replied, 
Flapp'd round his cage with joyous screech, 

Dropt down, and died. 

In glancing over Mr. Patmore's reading of this 
little piece, I am annoyed by observing several 
alterations in Campbell's punctuation : every altera- 
tion manifestly for the worse. But there is a more 
serious tampering with the text. The moral of the 
poem, of course, is that parrots have hearts and 



340 Concerning Ctttting and Carving. 

memories as well as we. And the poem sets out 
by stating that great principle. The first verse is : 

The deep affections of the breast, 

That Heaven to hving things imparts, 

Are not exclusively possess'd 
By human hearts. 

Mr. Patmore has the bad taste, not to say more, to 
leave that verse out. I cannot see any good reason 
why. The principle it states is one which a word 
or two would render quite intelligible to any child. 
Indeed, to any child who could not take in that 
principle, the entire story would be quite unintel- 
ligible. And I cannot recognise Mr. Patmore's 
treatment of this poem as other than an unjustifi- 
able tampering with the coin of the realm. 

There is another poem of Campbell's which fares 
as badly. Campbell calls it Napoleon and the 
British Sailor. Mr. Patmore, in his zeal for cutting 
and carving, calls it Napoleon and the Sailor : a 
true Story. This poem, like the last, sets out with 
a principle or sentiment ; and then goes on with the 
facts. Mr. Patmore takes it upon himself to leave 
out that first verse : and then to daub the second 
verse in order to make it intelligible in the absence 
of the first. I hold this to be utterly unpardon- 
able. It is emphatically Raphael improved by the 
sign-painter. And the pretext of anything ' unfit 
for children's reading' will not hold here. Any 



Concerning Cutting and Carving. 341 

child that could understand the story, would un- 
derstand this first verse : 

I love contemplating — apart 

From all his homicidal glory, 
The traits that soften to our heart 

Napoleon's story ! 

Then Campbell's second verse runs thus : 

'T was while his banners at Boulogne 
Armed in our island every freeman, 

His navy chanced to capture one 
Poor British seaman. 

Thus simply and naturally does the story which 
follows, rise out of the sentiment which the poet 
has expressed. But as Mr. Patmore has cut out 
the sentiment, he finds it necessary to tamper with 
the second verse : and accordingly he starts in this 
abrupt, awkward, and ugly fashion ; which no true 
reader of Campbell will behold without much in- 
dignation : and which would have roused the sen- 
sitive poet himself to still greater wrath : — 

Napoleon's banners at Boulogne 

Armed in our island every freeman, 
His navy chanced 

And so on. Here, you see, in the verse as 
improved by Mr. Patmore, we have two distinct 
propositions ; separated by a comma. Mr. Patmore 
not merely has no eye for punctuation; but is 
plainly ignorant of its first principles. If any school- 
boy, after having had the use of the colon and 



342 Concerning Cutting and Carving. 

semicolon explained to him, were to use a comma 
in such fashion in an English theme, he would 
richly deserve a black mark for stupidity; and he 
would doubtless receive one. But apart from this 
lesser matter, which will not seem small to any one 
with a sense of grammatical accuracy, I ask whether 
it be not too bad that Campbell's natural and 
beautiful verse should be adulterated into this irri- 
tating caricature of it. 

Let us next test Mr. Patmore's accuracy in 
exhibiting Sir Walter Scott. Everybody knows 
Lady Herons Song^Mich Sir Walter himself called 
Lochinvar : but which Mr. Patmore, eager for 
change, calls Young LocAmvar. Sir Walter's first 
two lines are these : 

O, young Lochinvar is come out of the west, 
Through all the wide Border his steed was the best. 

Mr. Patmore cannot render these simple lines 
accurately. He begins IVes^ with a capital letter : 
which, right or wrong. Sir Walter did not. Then 
he puts a point of exclamation after IVes^, w^here 
Sir Walter has a comma. Sir Walter tells us that 
Lochinvar's sUed was the best'. Mr. Patmore im- 
proves the statement into his steed is the best. The 
very pettiness of these changes makes them the 
more irritating. Granting that Mr. Patmore's read- 
ing is neither better nor worse than the original, 
why not leave us the poem as the great man gave 



Concerning Cutting and Carving. 343 

it us ? Through all that well-known song, one is 
worried by Mr. Patmore's wretched little smears of 
red paint. The punctuation throughout is no longer 
matter for an imposition : it is matter for a flogging. 
Sir Walter says, 

So boldly he entered the Netherby Hall : 

Mr. Patmore with his brush makes it so bravely. 
And, eager for change at any price, Mr. Patmore 
gives us a new spelling of the name of the river 
Esk. Sir Walter, like everybody else, spells that 
word Esk. Mr. Patmore is not content with this, 
but develops the word into Eskc. Sir Walter 
describes a certain locality as Camiobie Lee. Mr. 
Patm.ore improves the name into Cannobie LEA. 
And finally, the song ending with a question. Sir 
Walter ends it with a point of interrogation. But 
Mr. Patmore, impatient of the restraints of grammar, 
concludes with a point of exclamation. 

All this is really too bad. Byron fares no better : 
and Mr. Patmore's alterations are of the same irri- 
tating and contemptible kind. Byron wrote 

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, 

But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride ; 

Mr. Patmore cannot leave this alone. In the first 
line he reads nostrils for nostril : in the second, t/ie77z 
for it. Now, not only are Byron's words the best, 
just because Byron chose them : but Byron's de- 
scription is strikingly true to fact. Every one who 



344 Conceiving Ctitting and Carving. 

has ever seen a horse fallen, or a horse dead, knows 
how remarkably flat the creature lies upon the 
ground. It is startHng to find the sixteen hands of 
height when the animal was upon his legs, turned 
to something that hardly surpasses your knee when 
the creature is lying upon his side. And the head 
of a dead horse, lying upon the ground, would show 
one nostril and not two. You would see only the 
upper one : and remark that the warm breath of 
the creature was no longer rolling through that. 
These little matters make just the difference be- 
tween being accurate and being inaccurate: between 
being right and being wrong. 

I do not know whether it be from a desire to 
improve Mr. Keble's name, that Mr. Patmore, in 
his Index of Writers, alters it to Keeble. I object 
likewise to Mr. Patmore's improving Barnfield's 

couplet 

She, poor bird, as all forlorn, 
Leaned her breast up till a thorn : 

by substituting against for tip till. The very 
stupidest child would know, after one telling, the 
meaning of/// till: and Mr. Patmore's alteration is 
a destruction of the antique flavour of the piece. 

The thoughtful reader, who has had some expe- 
rience of life, must have arrived at this conviction : 
that if two or three slices of a leg of mutton are 
extremely bad, all the rest of the leg is probably 
bad too. I have not examined the whole of Mr. 



Concernmg Ctitting and Carving. 345 

Patmore's volume: but I am obliged to conclude, 
from the absence of minute accuracy in the pieces 
which I have examined, that the entire volume is 
deficient in minute accuracy. Now, in a book like 
this, accuracy is the first thing. If any scholar 
were to take up a play of ^schylus or Aristophanes, 
and find it as carelessly edited as several of the 
poems which we have considered, I think the scholar 
would be disposed to throw that play into the fire. 
And I cannot for my life see why perfect accuracy 
should be less sought after by an editor of English 
poems than by an editor of Greek plays. 

But on the general question of cutting and carv- 
ing I would almost go so far as to say, that after a 
poem has been current for years, and has found a 
place in many memories, not even its author has 
a right to alter it. Nothing, at least, but an im- 
provement the most extraordinary, can justify such 
a breaking in upon a host of old associations. 
It is a mortifying thing, when a man looks, in 
later life, into the volumes of his favourite author, 
to find that the things he best remembers are no 
longer there. Even manifest improvement cannot 
reconcile us to the change. When the present 
writer was a youth at college, he cherished an 
enthusiastic admiration for John Foster's Essays. 
Let it be said, his admiration is hardly less now. 
I read and re-read them in a large octavo volume : 
one of the earlier editions, which had not received 



34^ Concer^iing Cutting and Carving. 

the author's latest corrections. Yet I valued every 
phrase : and I well remember how aggrieved I 
felt when I got an edition with Foster's final 
emendations : and found that Foster had cut out, 
and toned down, and varied, just the things of 
which my memory kept the firmest hold. One 
feels as though one had a vested interest in what 
had been so prized and lingered over. You know 
how Wordsworth and Moore kept touching up 
their verses : generally for the worse. I do not 
think the last edition which Wordsworth himself 
corrected, is the best edition of his poetry. In 
that poem of his which has already been named, 
concerning the faithful dog on Helvellyn, he made, 
late in life, various little changes : which not being 
decidedly for the better, must be held as for the 
worse. For any change from the dear old way is 
for the worse, unless it be very markedly for the 
better. And surely, after describing the finding 
of the poor tourist's body, the old way, which was 

this: 

Sad sight ! the shepherd, with a sigh, 
Looks round, to learn the history : 

is quite as good as the new way, which is this : 

The appalled Discoverer with a sigh, 
Looks round, to learn the history. 

No rule, indeed, can be laid down here. No 
great poet cuts and carves upon his own produc- 



Concerning Cutting and Carvi^ig. 347 

tions so much as Mr. Tennyson. You remember 

how 

Revered Victoria, you that hold — 

has changed into 

Revered, beloved, oh you that hold. 

You remember how in the story of the school- 
boys who stole a litter of pigs, the passage, 

We paid in person, scored upon that part 
Which cherubs want : 

has now dropped all reference to the scoring. And 
Locks ley Hall bristles with verbal alterations, which 
every careful reader of Tennyson knows. One 
bows, of course, in the presence of Mr. Tennyson ; 
and does not venture to set up one's own taste as 
against his. Yet, let me confess it, I miss and I 
regret some of the old things. Doubtless there are 
passages which at the first were open to hostile 
criticism, and which met it : which now have been 
raised above all cavil. There is that passage in 
the Dream of Fair Women, which describes the 
death of Iphigenia. She tells of it herself Here 
is the verse as it stands even in the seventh edition ; 

The tall masts quivered as they lay afloat, 
The temples and the people and the shore ; 

One drew a sharp knife thrd niy tender throat 
Slowly^ — and nothmg 7nore. 

Every one feels how unpleasant is the picture con- 
veyed by the last two lines. It passes the limits of 



34^ Concerning Cutting and Carving, 

tragedy, and approaches the physically revolting. 
It is, likewise, suggestive rather of the killing of a 
sheep or pig, than of the solemn sacrifice of a hu- 
man being. I confess, I incomparably prefer the 
simplicity of the inspired statement : ' And Abra- 
ham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to 
slay his son.' We don't want any details as to how 
the knife was to be used ; or as to the precise point 
at which it was to let out life. It would jar, were 
we to read, ' Abraham stretched forth his hand, and 
was just going to cut Isaac's throat' Now Mr. 
Tennyson is worse than that : for he gives us, 
doubtless with painful accuracy, the account of the 
actual cutting of the throat. Then, besides this, 
Mr. Tennyson's verse, as it used to stand, was 
susceptible of a wrong interpretation. I do not 
mean that any candid reader would be likely to 
mistake the poet's sense : but I mean that an ill-set 
critic would have occasion for misrepresenting it. 
You may remember that a severe critic did mis- 
represent it. In an ancient Review, you may see 
the verse printed as I have given it above : and 
then the critic goes on to say something like this : 
' What an unreasonable person Iphigenia must have 
been ! "He cut my throat : nothing more : " what 
more could the woman possibly want 1 ' Of course, 
we know what the poet meant : but, in strictness, 
what he meant he did not say. But look to the 
latest edition of Mr. Tennyson's poems ; and you 



Concerning Cutting and Carving. 349 

will be content. Here is the verse now. You will 
see that it has been most severely cut and carved ; 
but to a most admirable result : 

The high masts trembled as they lay afloat ; 

The towers, the temples wavered, and the shore ; 
The bright death quivered at the victim's throat, 

Touched, and I knew no more. 

I should fancy, my friend, that you have nothing 
to say against such tampering with the coin. This 
is as though a piece of baser metal were touched 
with the philosopher's stone, and turned to gold. 
And there have been cases in which a very felici- 
tous change has been made by one man upon the 
writing of another. A single touch has sometimes 
done it. I wonder whether Mr. Palgrave was aware 
that in giving in his book those well-known verses 
To A Ithea from Prison^ which he rather absurdly 
describes as by Colonel Lovelace (why does he not 
tell us that his extracts from a greater poet are by 
William Shakespeare, Esquire ">), there is one verse 
which he has not given as Lovelace wrote it : 

When I lie tangled in her hair 

And fetter'd to her eye. 
The birds, that wanton in the air, 

Know no such liberty. 

Lovelace wrote ' the gods that waiiton in the air : ' 
and birds was substituted by Bishop Percy. It is 
a simple and obvious substitution : and the change 
is so greatly and so unquestionably for the better, 



350 Concer7iing Cutting and Carving. 

that it may well be accepted : as indeed it has uni- 
versally been. 

The mention of a happy substitution naturally 
suggests the most unhappy substitutions on record. 
You may remember how the great scholar, Bentley, 
puffed up by his success in making emendations on 
Horace and Terence, unluckily took it upon himself 
to edit Milton. And here indeed, we have, with a 
vengeance, Raphael improved by the painter of 
wagons. Milton wrote, as everybody knows : 

No light, but rather darkness visible : 

but Bentley, eager to improve the line, turns it to 

No light, but rather a transpicuous gloo7n. 

There is another passage in which the contrast 
between the master and the wagon-painter is 
hardly less marked. Where Milton wrote, 

Our torments also may in length of time 
Become our elements : 

Bentley, as an improvement, substituted the follow- 
ing remarkable passage, 

Then, as 'twas well observed^ our torments may, 
Become our elements. 

It is to be admitted that the stupidity of Bentley's 
reading, is even surpassed by its impudence. Of 
course, the principle taken for granted at the be- 
ginning of such a work is, that Bentley's taste and 
judgment were better than Milton's. For, you 



Concerning Cutting and Carving. 351 

observe, there was no pretext here of restoring a 
more accurate reading, lost through time : there 
was no pretext of giving more exactly what Milton 
wrote. There was no question as to Milton's pre- 
cise words : but Bentley thought to make them 
better. And there is something insufferable in the 
picture of the self-satisfied old Don, sitting down 
in his easy chair with Paradise Lost', and, pencil 
in hand, proceeding to improve it. Doubtless he 
was a very great classical scholar : but unless his 
wits had mainly forsaken him when he set himself 
to edit Milton, it is very plain that he never could 
have been more than an acute verbal critic. Think- 
ing of Bentley's Milton, one imagines the Apollo 
Belvedere put in a hair-dresser's window, with a 
magnificent wig : and dressed in a suit of clothes 
of the very latest fashion. I think likewise of an 
incident in the life of Mr. N. P. Willis, the Ameri- 
can author. When he was at college in his youth, 
the head of his college kept a white horse, which 
he was accustomed to drive in a vehicle of some kind 
or other. Mr. N. P. Willis and his companions surrep- 
titiously obtained temporary possession of the horse; 
and painted it crimson, with a blue mane and tail. 
1 confess that I like Mr. N. P. Willis better for that 
deed, than for anything else I ever heard of his 
doing : and I may mention, for the satisfaction of 
my younger readers, that the colours used in paint- 
ing the horse were of such a nature, that they 



352 Concerning Cutting and Carving. 

adhered to the animal for a lengthened period, 
notwithstanding all endeavours to remove them. 
Now Dr. Bentley, in editing Milton, did as it were 
paint the white horse crimson and blue ; and then 
exhibit it to the world, saying, ' That is Smith's 
fine horse!' Nor should it be accepted as any 
apology for like conduct on the part of any editor, 
that the editor in good faith has such a liking for 
these colours, that he thinks a horse looks best 
when it looks blue and crimson. And though the 
change made by an editor be not of such a com- 
prehensive nature as the painting of an entire horse 
anew, but rather consists of a multitude of little 
touches here and there ; — as points changed, 
capitals left out, and whiches for thats ; still the 
result is very irritating. You know that a very 
small infusion of a foreign substance can vitiate a 
thing. Two drops of prussic acid in a cup of 
water : two smears of red paint across the Raphael : 
affect the whole. I know hardly any offence, short 
of great crime, which seems to me deserving of 
so severe punishment, as this of clipping the coin 
of the realm of literature. 

There is something, too, which irritates one, in 
the self-sufficient attitude which is naturally as- 
sumed by a man who is cutting and carving the 
composition of another. It is an evil which attends 
all reviewing, and which a modest and conscientious 
reviewer must feel keenly, that in reviewing ano- 



Concemmg Cutting and Carving. 353 

ther man's book, you seem to assume a certain 
superiority to him. For in every case in which 
you find fault with him, you are aware that the 
question comes just to this : whether your opinion 
or his is worth most. To which may be added the 
further question : whether you or he have devoted 
most time and thought to forming a just opinion 
on this particular point. But when a man sits 
down not merely to point out an author's faults, 
but to correct them ; the assumption of superiority 
is more marked still. And everybody knows that 
the writings of great geniuses have been un- 
sparingly cut and carved by very inferior men. 
You know how Byron sent The Siege of Corinth to 
Mr. Gifford, giving him full power to alter it to 
any extent he pleased. And you know how Mr. 
Gifford did alter it; by cutting out all the good 
passages and leaving all the bad. The present 
writer has seen a man in the very act of cutting 
and carving. Once upon a time, I entered a 
steamer which was wont to ply upon the waters of 
a certain noble river, that winds between Highland 
hills. And entering that bark, I beheld a certain 
friend, seated on the quarter-deck, with a little 
volume in his hand. I never saw a man look 
more entirely satisfied with himself than did my 
friend ; as he turned over the leaves of the little 
volume in a hasty, skipping fashion; and jauntily 
scribbled here and there with a pencil. I beheld 
A A 



354 Concerning Cutting and Carving. 

him in silence for a time, and then asked what on 
earth he was doing. ' Oh/ said he, ' I am a member 
of the committee appointed by the Great Council 
to prepare a new book of hymns to be sung 
throughout the churches of this country. And 
this little volume is a proof copy of the hymns 
suggested : and a copy of it is sent to each member 
of the committee to receive his emendations. And, 
as you see, I am beguiling my time in sailing down 
the river by improving these hymns.' In this easy 
manner did my friend scribble whatever alterations 
might casually suggest themselves, upon the best 
compositions of the best hymn writers. Slowly 
and laboriously had the authors written these 
hymns, carefully weighing each word : and weigh- 
ing each word perhaps for a very long time. But 
in the pauses of conversation, with no serious 
thought whatsoever, but willing to testify how 
much better he knew what a hymn should be than 
the best authors of that kind of literature, did my 
friend set down his random thoughts. ' Give me 
that volume,' said I, with no small indignation. He 
gave it to me, and I proceeded to examine his 
improvements. And I can honestly say that not 
merely was every alteration for the worse ; but that 
many of the alterations testified my friend's utter 
ignorance of the very first principles of metrical 
composition ; and that all of them testified the 
extreme narrowness of his acquaintance with that 



Concerning Ctitting and Carving. 355 

species of literature. Some of the verses, as altered 
by him, were astounding specimens of rhythm. 
The only thing I ever saw which equalled them 
was a stanza by a local poet, very zealous for the 
observance of the Lord's day. Here is the 
stanza : — 

Ye that keep horses, read psalm 50 : 

To win money on the Sabbath day, see that ye never be so 
thrifty ! 

In Scotland, we have a psalter and a hymnal 
imposed by ecclesiastical authority ; so that in all 
parish churches there is entire uniformity in the 
words of praise. But it worries one to enter a 
church in England, and to find, as one finds so 
often, that the incumbent has published a hymnal, 
the sale of which he ensures by using it in his 
church : and all the hymns in which are cut and 
carved to suit his peculiar doctrinal and assthetical 
views. The execrable taste and the remarkable 
ignorance evinced in some of these compilations, 
have on myself, I confess, the very reverse of a 
devotional effect. And the inexpressible badness 
of certain of the hymns' I have seen in such 
volumes, leads me to the belief that they must be 
the original compositions of the editor himself 
There is an excellent little volume of Psalms and 
Hymns, collected by Mr. Henry Herbert Wyatt, 
of Trinity Chapel, Brighton : but even in it, one is 



35^ Concer7ting Cutting and Carving. 

annoyed by occasional needless changes. In 
Bishop Heber's beautiful hymn, which begins, 
* From Greenland's icy mountains,' Mr. Wyatt has 
smeared the third verse. The Bishop wrote, as 
everybody knows. 

Shall we, whose souls are lighted 

With wisdom from on high, — 
Shall we to men benighted 

The lamp of life deny ? 

But Mr. Wyatt substitutes can for the shall with 
which the first and third lines begin : a change 
which no man of sense can call an improvement. 
A hymn to which I always turn, as one that tests 
an editor, is Bishop Ken's incomparable one, com- 
monly called the Evening Hymn. I find, with 
pleasure, that Mr. Wyatt has not tried to improve 
it : save that he has adopted an alteration which 
has been all but universally accepted. Bishop 
Ken wrote, 

All praise to Thee, my God, this night : 

while most of us, from childhood, have been taught 
to substitute Glory for All Praise. And this is 
certainly an improvement. Glory, gloria, is cer- 
tainly the right word with which to begin an 
ascription of praise to the Almighty. If not in 
itself the fittest word, the most ancient and revered 
associations of the Christian Church give it a 
prescriptive right to preference. A hymn which 



Concerjting Cutting and Carving. 357 

no man seems able to keep his sacrilegious hands 
off, is Charles Wesley's hymn, 

Jesu, lover of my soul. 
I observ'e Mr. Wyatt makes three alterations in 
the first three lines of it : each alteration for the 
worse. But I begin to be aware that no human 
being can be trusted to sit down with a hymn book 
and a pencil ; with leave to cut and carve. There 
is a fascination about the work of tampering : and 
a man comes to change for what is bad, rather 
than not change at all. There are analogous cases. 
When I dwelt in the country, I w^as once cutting a 
little path through a dense thicket of evergreens : 
and a friend from the city, who was staying with 
us, went out wath me to superintend the proceed- 
ings. Weakly, I put into my friend's hands a large 
and sharp weapon, called in Scotland a saitcJiing- 
knife: and told him he might smooth off certain 
twigs which projected unduly on the path. My 
friend speedily felt the fascination of cutting and 
carving. And after having done considerable 
damage, he restored me the weapon, saying he felt 
its possession was a temptation too strong for him 
to resist. When walking about with the keen 
sharp steel in his hand, it was really impossible 
to help snipping off any projecting branch which 
obtruded itself upon the attention. And the 
writer's serv^ant . (dead, poor fellow : one of the 
worthiest though most unbending of men) declared, 



358 Concerning Ctttting and Carving. 

with much solemnity and considerable Indignation, 
that in forming a walk he would never again suffer 
the scutchlng-knife to be in any other hands than 
his own. Now, it is a like temptation that assails 
the editor of hymns : and even if the editor is a 
competent man (and In most cases he is not), I 
don't think it safe to trust him with the scutchlng- 
knife. The only editor of hymns whom the 
writer esteems as a perfect editor, is Sir Roundell 
Palmer. For Sir Roundell starts with the deter- 
mination to give us each hymn exactly as its 
author left It. It is delightful to read ' All praise 
to Thee, my God, this night :' and to come upon 

Jesu, lover of my soul, 
Let me to Thy bosom fly : 

after * Jesu, Saviour of my soul : ' and * Jesus, re- 
fuge of my soul.' I remark. In Sir Roundell's 
book, occasional signs of having taken a hymn 
from an early edition of the author's works : v/hich 
in later editions was retouched by the author him- 
self. Thus James Montgomery's * Friend after 
friend departs,' is given as first published : not as 
the author left it. In the four verses, Montgomery 
made five alterations : which are not shown In Sir 
Roundell's work. But, as one who feels much in- 
terest In hymnal literature, and who has given some 
attention to it, I cannot refrain from saying that in 
the matter of faithfulness, Sir Roundell Palmer's 
book Is beyond question or comparison the best. 



Co7icerni7ig Ctttting and Carving. 359 

' There is nothing second, third, or tenth to it. It 
is first : and the rest are nowhere. 

Having mentioned the best hymnal that I know, 
one naturally thinks of the worst. There is a little 
volume purporting to be Hymns collected by the 
Committee of tJie General Assembly on Psalmody : 
published at Edinburgh in i860. It is to be re- 
membered that the Church of Scotland has never 
approved this little volume : the committee have 
published it on their own responsibility. Mr. 
Wyatt, in making his collection, tells us he ex- 
amined thirty thousand hymns, and took the best 
of them. Sir Roundell Palmer also gives us in his 
volume the best hymns in the language. But 
neither Mr. Wyatt nor Sir Roundell (both most 
competent judges) has seen fit to admit much of 
the matter contained in this little compilation. So 
we may conclude, either that Mr. Wyatt did not 
find some of these compositions among his thirty 
thousand : or that, having examined them, he did 
not think them worthy of admission to his collec- 
tion of about two hundred and fifty hymns. Sir 
Roundell Palmer's hymns number four hundred 
and twelve : and he has not erred on the side of 
exclusion : yet he has excluded a good many of the 
Scotch eighty-five. Out of the first fifteen of the 
Scotch book, fourteen are unknown to him. And 
I do not think cutting and carving ever went to a 
length so reprehensible, as in this volume. As to 



360 Concerning Cutting and Carving. 

the fitness of the hymns for use in church, opinions 

may possibly differ : but I am obliged to say that 

I never saw any collection of such pieces so filled 

with passages in execrable taste, and utterly unfit 

for Christian worship. 

It may amuse my readers, to show them George 

Herbert improved. Everybody knows the famous 

poem, The Elixir. It consists of six verses. The 

Scotch reading consists of four. In the first verse, 

three verbal alterations, intended as improvements, 

are made on Herbert. * Teach me, my God and 

king,' becomes * Teach us, our God and king.' The 

second verse in the Scotch reading, is unknown to 

Herbert. It is the doing of some member of the 

committee. The gold has been punched out, and 

a piece of pinchbeck has been put in. Herbert's 

third verse is omitted. Then comes the well-known 

verse : 

All may of Thee partake : 
Nothing can be so mean, 
Which, with this tincture, FOR THY SAKE, 
Will not grow bright and clean. 

This is improved as follows : 

All may of Thee partake ; 
Nothing so sinall can be. 
But draws ^ when ACTED for Thy sake^ 
Greatness and worth from Thee. 

You will doubtless think that Herbert pure is 
better than Herbert improved by the sign-painter. 



Concerning Ctitting and Carving. 2>^ r 

But the next verse is smeared even worse. Who 

does not remember the saintly man's words : 

A servant with this clause, 
Makes drudgery divine : 
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, 
Makes that, and the action, fine. 

But, as Sam Weller remarked of Mr. Pickwick 

in a certain contingency, * his most formihar friend 

voodnt know him,' as thus disguised : 

If done beneath Thy laws, 
Even humblest labours shine : 
Hallowed is toil, if this the cause, 
The meanest work, divine. 

Herbert's temper, we know, was angelic : but I 
wonder what he would have looked like, had he 
seen himself thus docked, and painted crimson and 
blue. No doubt, The Elixir, as the master left it, 
is not fitted for congregational singing. But that 
is a reason for leaving it alone : it is no reason for 
thus unpardonably tampering with the coin of the 
realm. 

There are various pieces in this unfortunate 
work, whose appearance in it I can explain only on 
this theory. Probably, some day when the com- 
mittee met, a member of committee produced a 
manuscript, and said that here was a hymn of his 
own composition ; and begged that it might be put 
in the book. The other members read it, and saw 
it was rubbish : but their kindly feeling prevented 
their saying so : and in it went. One of the last 



362 Concerning Cutting and Carving. 

things many people learn, is not to take offence 
when a friend declines to admire their literary 
doings. I have not the faintest idea who are the 
members of the committee which issued this com- 
pilation. Likely enough, there are in it some 
acquaintances of my own. But that fact shall not 
prevent my saying what I honestly believe : that 
it is the very worst hymn-book I ever saw. I can- 
not believe that the persons who produced it, could 
ever have paid any attention to hymnal literature : 
they have so thoroughly missed the tone of all good 
hymns. Indeed, many of the hymns seem to be 
formed on the model of what may be called the 
Scotch Preaching Prayer : the most offensive form 
of devotion known ; and one entirely abandoned 
by all the more cultivated of the Scotch clergy. I 
heard, indeed, lately, an individual pray at a meet- 
ing about the Lord's day. In his prayer, he alluded 
to the Lancashire distress : and informed the Al- 
mighty that the patience with which the Lancashire 
people bore it was very much the result of their 
being trained in Sunday schools. But, leaving this 
volume, which is really not worth farther notice, let 
me mention, that in the first twelve lines of * Jesu, 
lover of my soul,' there are ten improvements made 
on Wesley. *■ While the tempest still is high,' has 
nigh substituted for high. * Till the storm of life 
is past,' is made ' Till the storms of life are past,' 
Oh receive my soul at last,' has And substituted 



Concerning Ctttting and Carving. 363 

for OJi : for no conceivable reason. And the fa- 
miliar line, ' Hangs my helpless soul on Thee/ has 
been turned, by the wagon-painter, into * Clings 
my helpless soul to Thee.' I ask any intelligent 
reader, Is not this too bad } I am a clergyman of 
the Church of Scotland, for whose use these hymns 
have been so debased and tampered with. They 
never shall be sung in my church, you may rely on 
it. And the fact, that this cutting and carving has 
been done so near home, serves only to make me 
the more strongly to protest against it. 

If it were not far too large a subject to take up 
now, I should say something in reprobation of the 
fashion in which many people venture to cut and 
cai*ve upon words far more sacred than those of any 
poet : I mean, upon the words of Holy Scripture. 
Many people improve a scriptural text or phrase 
when they quote it : the improvement generally 
consisting in giving it a slight twist in the direction 
of their own peculiar theological views. I have 
heard of a man who quoted as from Scripture the 
following words : ' It is appointed unto all men 
once to die ; and after death HelU It was pointed 
out to him that no such statement exists in Scrip- 
ture : the words which follow the mention of death 
being, ' and after this the judgment.' But the mis- 
quoter of Scripture declined to accept the correc- 
tion, declaring that he thought his own reading was 



364 Concerning Cutting and Carving. 

better. I have heard of a revival preacher who 
gave out as his text the words * Ye shall all likewise 
perish/ Every one will know what a wicked dis- 
tortion he made of our Saviour's warning in thus 
clipping it. And I have heard texts of Scripture 
pieced together in a way that made them convey 
a meaning just as far from that of the inspired 
writers, as that conveyed by the well known mo- 
saic, *■ And Judas departed, and went and hanged 
himself:' ' Go thou and do likewise.' 

Probably the reader is tired of the subject. I 
thank him for his patience in following me so far. 




CHAPTER XVIL 
FROM SATURDAY TO MONDAY, 




HERE are great people who have seen so 
much, that they are not surprised by any- 
thing. There are silly people who have 
not seen very much, but who think it a fine thing 
to pretend that they are not surprised by anything. 
As for the present writer, he has seen so little that 
he feels it very strange to find himself here= And 
he has not the least desire to pretend that he does 
not feel it so. 

This morning the writer awoke in a bare little 
chamber, curtainless and carpetless, in that great 
hotel at Lucerne in Switzerland which is called the 
Schweizer Hof. And having had breakfast in a 
very large and showy dining-room, along with two 
travelling companions, he is now standing at a win- 
dow of that apartment, and looking out. Just in 
front, there spreads the green lake of Lucerne. 
Away to the left, is the Rigi : and to the right, be- 
yond the lake, the lofty Pilatus, in a tarn on whose 



366 From Saturday to Monday. 

summit tradition says the banished governor of 
Judea drowned himself, stricken by conscience for 
his unjust condemnation of Christ. The town stands 
at this end of the lake ; divided into two parts by 
the river Reuss, which here flows out of the lake in 
a swift green stream, running with almost the speed 
of a torrent. There is a glare of light and heat 
everywhere in the town : most of all on the broad 
level piece of ground which at this point spreads 
between the lake and several hotels. On a rising 
ground, a few hundred yards off, rising steeply from 
the lake, stands the Roman Catholic cathedral, a 
somewhat shabby building, with two lofty slender 
spires at its west end. There are cloisters round it: 
and from several openings in the wall on the side 
towards the lake, you have delightful peeps of the 
green water below and of snow-capped hills beyond. 
If you enter that cathedral at almost any time, you 
will find its plain interior filled by a large congre- 
gation; and you will hear part of the service 
boisterously roared out by priests of unprepos- 
sessing aspect. Why do the Rom.an priests so 
furiously bellow t 

This is a Saturday morning in August : a beauti- 
ful bright morning. 

There is no part of the week that is so well 
remembered by many people, as the period from 
Saturday to Monday: including both the former 
and the latter days. That season of time has a 



From Saturday to Monday. 367 

character of its own : and many pleasant visits and 
expeditions have been comprised within it. Every 
one can sympathize with the poet Prior, and can 
understand the picture he calls up, when he de- 
scribes himself as 'in a little Dutch chaise on a 
Saturday night ; on his left hand his Horace, and a 
friend on his right,' going out to the country to stay 
till Monday with the friend so situated. I fear, 
indeed, that Prior would not go to church on the 
Sunday ; which I can only regret. But I am going 
to spend this time in a way as different as may be 
from that in which I am accustomed to spend it, or 
in which I ever spent it before. 

When the writer arises on common Saturdays, 
the thing he has in prospect is several quiet hours 
spent in going over the sermons he has to preach 
on the following day. I suppose that most clergy- 
men who do their work as well as they can, do on 
Saturday morning after breakfast walk into their 
study, and sit down in that still retreat to work. 
And if, on other days, you are thinking all the while 
you are at work there, of ten sick people you have 
to see, and of a host of other matters that must be 
attended to out of doors, you will much enjoy the 
affluent sense of abundant time for thinking, which 
you will have if you make it a rule that on Satur- 
days you shall do no pastoral nor other parochial 
work. Then you ought to take a long walk in 
the afternoon; and give the evening to entire 



368 From Saturday to Monday. 

rest, refreshing your mind by some light cheerful 
reading. 

This advice, however, need not be prolonged ; as 
it is addressed to a limited order of men, and to 
men who are not likely to take it. And to-day, 
instead of sitting down to work, there is something 
quite different to be done. 

For it is time to cease looking out of the window 
at the Schweizer Hof, and to walk the short distance 
to the spot where a little steamer is preparing to 
start. The baggage of the three travellers is con- 
tained in three black leather bags, of modest size. 
The steamer departs, and leaves the town behind : 
but to-day, instead of sailing the length of the lake 
to where it ends amid the wilds of Uri, we turn to 
the right hand into a retired bay, which gradually 
shallows, till the depth of water becomes very small. 
Pilatus is on the right; and the place where in 
former days there used to be the Slide of A Ipnach. 
The sides of Pilatus are covered with great forests, 
the timber of which would be of great use if it 
could be readily got hold of And the Slide was 
made for the purpose of bringing down great trees 
from spots from which any ordinary conveyance 
would be impossible. So a trough of wood was 
formed, eight miles in length, beginning high up 
the mountain, and ending at the lake. It was six 
feet wide, and four feet deep : a stream of water was 
made to flow through it, to lessen friction. It wound 



From Saturday to Monday. 369 

about to suit the ground, and was carried, bridge- 
like, over three deep ravines. The trees intended 
to be sent down by it, were stripped of bark and 
branches ; and then launched away. The biggest 
trees did the eight miles in six minutes; tearing 
down with a noise like thunder, an avalanche of 
wood. Sometimes a tree leapt out of the Slide, in 
mid career, and was instantly smashed to atoms. 

The steamer stops at a rude little wharf, near 
which a great lumbering diligence is waiting : very 
clumsy, but comfortable. Six horses draw it, whose 
harness, made mainly of rope, is covered with bells, 
that keep up a ceaseless tinkle as we go. In Britain, 
we wish a carriage to run as quietly as possible : in 
Switzerland, they like a good deal of noise. We go 
slowly on, into the Canton of Unterwalden, by the 
little town of Sarnen, along a valley richly wooded. 
For a while, the road is level : then we begin to 
climb. And now, as is usual with British travellers, 
we get out and walk on, leaving the diligence to 
follow. We are entering the Brunig Pass. In 
former days, it could be traversed only on foot or 
on mules : now a carriage road has been made, a 
marvel of skilful engineering. We walk up a long 
steep ascent : on the left hand, far below, are little 
green lakes, and scattered chalets; on the right, 
rude hills. Every here and there, a little stream 
from the hills crosses the road. It is now a mere 
trickling thread of water : but acres on either side 

B B 



370 From Sahirday to Monday. 

of it, covered with huge stones, testify what a raging 
torrent it must be in winter. So we go on, till we 
reach a spot where we are to witness a piece of 
ingenuity combined with bad taste. Turn out of 
the highway by a little path to the right, and you 
come in two hundred yards to a sawmill, driven by 
an impetuous little stream. Where does the stream 
come from } It seems to issue out of the rocky 
wall, which a quarter of a mile above the sawmill 
here crosses the little upland valley. You follow 
the stream towards its source. You reach the rocky 
wall. And there, sure enough, violently rushing 
out through a low-browed dark tunnel, which it 
quite fills, you see the origin of the stream. What 
is on the other side of the rocky wall } 

Why, there is a considerable lake, which was 
once a great deal bigger. The Lake of Lungern 
was once a beautiful sheet of water, with fine wood 
coming down to its margin. But the people of the 
valley thought that by partially draining the lake, 
they might get some hundreds of acres of valuable 
land : and all consideration of the picturesque had 
to give way. The tunnel we have seen lowered the 
water in the lake by a hundred and twenty feet, 
and diminished its size to half. With great labour, 
the work of nineteen thousand days given by the 
peasants, the tunnel was made, beginning at its 
lower end, through the rocky ridge, to within six 
feet of the water at the end of the lake. These six 



From Saturday to Monday. 



01 



feet, of friable rock, were blown up with gunpowder, 
fired by three daring men who instantly fled ; and 
in a few minutes a black stream of mud and water 
appeared at the lower end of the tunnel. The 
traveller, returning by the sawmill to the road, goes 
on till he reaches the village : whence you may see 
a bare ugly tract of five hundred acres, dotted with 
wooden chalets, gained by spoiling the lake. 

Passing through the village, you climb on and 
on : the diligence makes no sign of overtaking you. 
You reach the summit at last, 3,600 feet above the 
sea : whence you have a grand view of the vale of 
Hash. These tremendous snowy peaks beyond are 
the peaks of the Wetterhorn, one of the grandest 
of the Alps. All this way, the road has been very 
lonely, but always richly wooded. Now you begin 
to go down. The road winds along the side of the 
mountain, cut out of the rock. In some places it 
is a mere notch, with great masses of rock hanging 
over far beyond its outer edge. And so, broken by 
a pause for some bread and wine at a little wayside 
inn, the day goes on towards evening. 

All this while, one is trying to feel that it is 
Saturday ; the familiar day one knows at home. 
For somehow it seems quite different. And in this 
strange country, where you are a foreigner, you 
feel yourself quite a different person from what you 
used to be at home. No doubt, by having two 
travelling companions from Britain, you keep a 



372 From Saturday to Monday. 

little of the British atmosphere about you. If you 
were walking down now into Hasli all alone, you 
would be much more keenly aware of the genius of 
the place. All your life, and your interests, at 
home, would grow quite shadowy and unreal. But 
this is one thing that makes a holiday season in 
a foreign country deliver you so thoroughly from 
your home burden of care and labour. How very 
lightly the charge of one's parish rests upon one, 
when the parish is a thousand miles away ! The 
thing which at home is always pressing on you so 
heavily, grows light, at that distance, as one of 
those coloured air-balls of India-rubber. 

And now, as the light is fading somewhat, the 
great diligence, running swiftly down the hill, and 
zigzagging round perilous corners, with little exer- 
tion of the six plump horses, but with a tremendous 
jingling of their bells, overtakes us : and for a mile 
or two you may enjoy a pleasant rest after the long 
walk. We stop at a place where a roofed wooden 
bridge crosses the river, turning sharp off to the 
left. Here we leave the big diligence ; and climb 
to the top of a lesser one which is waiting, a vast 
height. And now, in the growing darkness, we 
proceed slowly up the valley, following the course of 
the river Aar. On the right hand, huge precipices 
close in the valley, from which every now and 
then a streak of white foam, hundreds of feet 
in height, shows you a waterfall. It is perfectly 
silent, though these seem so near : they are much 



From Sahirday to Afonday. 373 

farther off than you are aware. On and on, up 
the river: till you can see lights ahead : and you jolt 
along a very roughly-paved street, where in the 
darkness you see picturesque wooden houses on 
either hand. This is Meyringen : one of the most 
thorough and beautiful Swiss villages to be found 
in Switzerland. What an odd Saturday evening this 
seems ! Our old w^ays of thinking and feeling are 
quite dislocated. We stop at the door of a large 
hotel, built of wood. Everything in it seems of 
wood, except the stone staircase. It is eight o'clock 
in the evening, — quite dark : they have not our long 
beautiful twilights there. And now we have din- 
ner. Then we inspect a room filled with carved 
work in wood which is for sale : and select some 
little things which will pleasantly remind us of this 
place and time when both are far away. Finally, 
before ten o'clock, we climb the long stair, each to 
his little bare chamber; with many thoughts of 
those at hom.e ; and trying unsuccessfully to feel 
that this is Saturday night. 

But the glory and beauty of Meyringen appeared 
the next morning: one of the sunniest, calmest, and 
brightest Sundays that ever shone since the crea- 
tion. You go forth from the hotel, and walk down 
the street, with the most picturesque wooden 
houses on either hand: with their projecting gal- 
leries and great overhanging eaves. Above, there 
is the brightest blue sky; and all round, snowy 
peaks, dazzling white, rising into the deep blue. 



374 From Saturday to Monday. 

Walk on till you are clear of the village, and fields 
of coarse grass spread round you : for you will not 
find there the soft green turf of Britain, but a rough 
harsh grass, alive with crickets and grasshoppers. 
We have some compensation for our uncertain cli- 
mate and abundant rain. Yet, amid that scenery, 
so sublime, still, and bright, you do not miss any- 
thing that could be desired. And now, on the 
silent Sunday morning, I have no doubt that of 
several men whom I saw, who though arrayed in 
mountain dress each Avore a white neckcloth, each 
one was thinking of his own church many hun- 
dreds of miles off, and hoping and asking that all 
might go well there that day. 

All round Meyringen there stand those snowy 
Alps. Let the small critic understand that we all 
know that an Alp does not strictly mean a moun- 
tain, but a pasture high in the mountains. But in 
Britain Alps mean mountains, and nothing else. 
And all round are those white peaks, save in the 
narrow opening where the Aar comes down from 
above, and where it rolls away below. From great 
precipices on the left hand as you look up the 
valley, streams descend in foamy falls : and one 
among these has sometimes brought down, in its 
flood, such masses of mud and gravel, as served to 
overspread half the valley. Turn up this little 
street, at whose end you can see the church, which 
is a Protestant one. Eighteen feet from the pave- 



From Saturday to Mo7tday. 375 

ment, there is a line drawn on the inside walls, 
showing the height to which the church was once 
filled with mud by an overflow of that torrent. 
Service is going on. We quietly enter, and steal 
to a seat by the door. A clergyman, in very ugly 
robes, is standing in the pulpit, which looks dia- 
gonally across the plain interior. He is reading 
his sermon, in a rather sleepy way. His robe is of 
blue, and a great white collar, turned over, is round 
his neck. Here is the best place to see a whole 
congregation, men and women, in their national 
dress. The men sit on one side of the church : 
and the women on the other. Swiss women are 
for the most part far from pretty. They wear 
here a black bodice, with white sleeves starched 
till they seem as stiff as boards : a yellow petti- 
coat, and a little black hat. The church was well 
filled : and the people seemed to listen very atten- 
tively to their pastor's words. 

But, for one thing, I do not understand them, for 
they are expressed in German : and for another 
thing I am going to worship elsewhere : so I slip 
quietly away. Just at the gate through which you 
pass into the churchyard, there is a shabby little 
building which I took for a school. No, it is the 
Little CJmrch'. and here, during the summer and 
autumn, you may join in the service of the Church 
of England. A succession of clergymen come, for 
a few weeks each. A little before the hour of 



37^ From Saturday to Monday. 

worship, we enter the building. It is just Hke a 
very shabby Scotch parish school. Forms without 
backs occupy the floor : at one corner there is an 
odd little enclosure which serves as a reading-desk 
and a pulpit : and a little way off there is placed 
a very small table, which is to-day covered with 
white, and bears the elements of the Communion. 
As the congregation assembles, five-and-twenty 
persons, the clergyman puts on his surplice ; and 
entering the little desk begins the service. I 
cannot but admire the determination this young 
minister shows, even in that shabby place, to make 
the worship of God as decorous as may be. 
Although there was no organ, there was quite a 
musical service : even the Psalms being chanted 
remarkably well. Five or six young Englishwomen 
acted as a choir. The lessons were read by an old 
gentleman standing by the little communion table. 
But a second surplice was not forthcoming : and he 
was devoid of any robe. The sermon was a very 
decent one : not eloquent nor striking, but plain 
and earnest. I should have liked it better, if the 
clergyman had prayed, before beginning it, in the 
words of one of the usual collects. But he simply 
prefaced his discourse by the words ' In the name 
of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy 
Ghost :' and by that exceedingly silly shibboleth, 
conveyed to me his adherence to a decaying party, 
which assuredly does not consist of the wisest or 



From Sattirday to Monday. ^jy 

ablest of the Anglican Clergy. There are, of 
course, two or three grand exceptions ; but there is 
something fatuous in the parade of going as near 
Rome as may be, which some empty-headed youths 
exhibit Let me add, that in the evening I went 
to service again. And now the sermon was so 
terribly bad, so weak and silly, that I found it 
hard to understand how any man who had brains 
to write the former discourse, could possibly have 
produced it. Yet the text was one of the noblest 
in Holy Scripture. 

After the forenoon service, we walk along a great 
wall, built to defend the valley from floods, towards 
the heights on the left hand, looking up the valley: 
and in the hot afternoon toil slowly up and up, till 
Meyringen is left far below. What is that distant 
sound } Well, it is that of rifle-shooting : for the 
men of Hash think Sunday afternoon the best time 
for practice. Let me confess that the perpetual 
reports broke in very sadly on the silence of the 
Holy Day. Yet there never was a nobler temple 
than that on which you looked, sitting down on a 
rock and gazing at the valley far below and the 
snowy Alps beyond. You could not but think of 
the words, chanted in that morning service, ' The 
strength of the hills is His also !' And sitting here, 
can one forget that at this hour the text is being 
read out in the church far away : can one help 
shutting out the "Alps for a little, and asking that 



378 From Saturday to Monday. 

the Blessed Spirit may carry the words that are to 
be spoken to many hearts, for warning, counsel, 
and comfort ? It is quite true, that when at a dis- 
tance of hundreds of miles, your home interests 
grow misty and unsubstantial : but it is likewise 
true that at such an hour as this, they press them- 
selves on one with a wonderful clearness and force. 
My friend Smith told me that in two hours' lonely 
walking under Mont Blanc, on a bright clear au- 
tumn day, he felt more worried by some little per- 
plexity which soon cleared itself up, than at any 
other time in his life. And sitting down on the 
edge of a glacier, whence a stream broke away in 
thunder, with the Monarch of Mountains looking 
down, all he could think of was that wretched 
little vexation. 

The Sunday dinner-hour at the Sattvage at Mey- 
ringen is four : so let us slowly descend from this 
height. A large party dines : chiefly English. The 
main characteristic of dinner was the fish called 
lotte, which is caught in the river near. There was 
a certain quietness becoming the day ; and it was 
pleasant to remark that the greater number of our 
countrymen seemed to make Sunday a day of rest. 
And indeed it is inexpressibly pleasant, after the 
fatigue and hurry which attend travelling rapidly 
on through grand scenery, to have an occasional 
day on which to repose. And going to church, 
with a little congregation of one's countrymen and 



From Satu7^day to Mo7iday. 



0/ 



countrywomen, to join in the familiar sen-ice in 
a strange land, one felt something of that glow 
which came into St. Paul's heart, when after his 
voyage he was cheered by the sight of Christian 
friends ; and which made him ' thank God and take 
courage.' 

Then to the evening ser\'ice, when the congrega- 
tion was less, and the sermon so extremely bad. 
The setting sun was casting a rosy colour upon the 
sno\\y peaks, as we returned to the onl}- home one 
had there. And indeed Sunday is the Avorst day 
at an inn. There is a strongly-felt inconsistency 
between the associations of the day, especially if you 
live in Scotland, and the Avhole look of the place. 
And sitting in a verandah behind the Sauvagc, with 
the fragrance of the trees in the twilight coming up 
from the garden below, and looking across to the 
Falls of the Relchenbach on the other side of the 
valley, it was worrying to think of the weak sermon 
we had just heard, where one had hoped for that 
which might cheer and comfort and direct. On 
another da}*, In a church In a grander scene than 
even this, I sat beside a certain great preacher 
while a poor sermon was being preached with much 
attempt at oratorical effect ; and thought how dif- 
ferent it would have been had that man occupied 
the pulpit. Perhaps he thought so too ; though he 
did not say so. But indeed, arrayed in garments 
of gre}', and with a wideawake hat lying beside 



380 From Sahtrday to Monday. 

him, that eminent clergyman was Hke a locomotive 
engine when the steam is not up. He could not 
have preached then ; at least, not without two hours 
of previous thought. Before the best railway engine 
can dash away with its burden, you must fill its 
boiler with water, and kindle its fire. And when 
you may see that clergyman ascend his pulpit in 
decorous canonicals on a Sunday, charged with his 
subject, with every nerve tense, and with the most 
earnest purpose on his rather frightened face, to 
deliver his message to many hundreds of immortal 
beings ; if you had previously seen the easy figure 
in the light-grey suit sitting in a pew at Chamouni, 
you would discern a like difference to that between 
the engine standing cold and powerless in the shed, 
and the engine coming slowly up to the platform, 
with the compressed strength of a thousand horses 
fretting for escape or employment, to take away 
the express train. 

To-morrow morning we have to be up at half- 
past four : so let us go to bed. First, let us have a 
look at the quiet street, indistinct in the twilight ; 
and at the outline of encircling hills. 

There are places in Switzerland where you do 
not sleep so well as might be desired. A host of 
wretched little enemies scarify your skin, and drive 
sleep from your eyes. The Sauvage at Meyringen 
is not one of these places. It is a thoroughly clean 
and respectable house. Yet for the guidance of 



From Saturday to Monday. 



tourists who may know even less than the writer 
(which is barely conceivable), let it be said that 
there is an effectual means of keeping such hostile 
troops away. Procure a quantity of camphor. Wear 
some of it in a bag about you ; a very little bag : 
and even though you sit next a disgusting, infra- 
grant, unwashed person in a diligence, nothing will 
assail you. And at night, rub a little of that mate- 
rial into powder between your palms, and sprinkle 
it over your bed, having turned back the bed-clothes. 
Do that, and you are safe. If you rub yourself over 
with camphor besides, you are secure as though 
wrapped in triple brass. You have made yourself 
an offensive object to the aesthetic sensibilities of 
fleas; and they will reject you with contempt. 
They will do this, even though, uncamphored, you 
might be (in the South Sea Island sense) a remark- 
ably good man. You remember how an Englishman 
once spoke to a chief of a tribe, out there. He 
spoke of a certain zealous missionary. 'Ah, he 
Avas a very good man, a very good man,' said the 
Englishman, truly and heartily. ' Yes,' said the 
chief, not so warmly : ' Him was a good man, but 
him was very tough ! ' The chief spoke with the air 
of one who says, critically, ' The venison at Smith's 
was not so good as usual last night.' And the 
Englishman forbore to enquire as to the data on 
which the chief pronounced his judgment. No doubt 
he had experimental knowledge on that subject. 



382 Prom Saturday to Monday. 

It is a great deal easier to get up in the dark at 
half-past four in the morning in Switzerland, than 
it is anywhere in Britain. There is something so 
bracing and exhilarating in the mountain air, that 
you are easily equal to exertion which would knock 
you up elsewhere. Men who at home could not 
walk five or six miles without fatigue, walk their 
thirty miles over a Pass without difficulty : come 
in to dinner with a good appetite ; and after dinner, 
without the least of that feeling of stiffness which 
commonly follows any unusual exertion, are out of 
doors again, sauntering in the twilight, or visiting 
some sight that is within easy reach. Yesterday 
was a resting day with us: so to-day, we had break- 
fast a little after five ; and then, the three black 
leather bags being disposed on a black horse, that 
scrambled like a cat over ground that would have 
ruined an English steed's knees in the first quarter 
of a mile, we set off at six o'clock to cross the Pass 
of the Great Scheideck to Grindelwald. 

First, along the road up the valley for a mile or 
so : then turn to the right and begin to climb the 
mountain which on that side walls the valley in. 
The ascent is very steep : and the path consists of 
smooth and slippery pieces of rock. You soon 
come to understand the wisdom of your guide, who 
requires you to walk at a very slow pace. That is 
your only chance, if you are to climb such ways 
for several successive hours. The inexperienced 



From Saturday to Monday. ^i^^i 

traveller pushes on at a rapid pace, and speedily is 
quite exhausted. After a little climbing, you may 
turn to the right, where you will see the torrent of 
the Reichenbach go down nearly two thousand feet 
in a succession of rapids and falls, hurrying to the 
Aar in the valley below. On, higher and higher, 
till you see the huge snowy mass of the Wetterhorn 
far before you on the left ; and you enter a little 
plain of bright green grass, dotted with many pictu- 
resque wooden chalets. On, higher and higher, till 
you stop to rest and have something to eat at the 
baths of Rosenlaui, a pretty inn near a rock where 
the Reichenbach comes roaring out of a cleft. In 
a large room here, you will be tempted to buy 
specimens of wood-carving, very beautifully done. 
Having rested, you determine to make a little 
deviation from your way. Twenty minutes' stiff 
pulling up the steep hill-side, over a very rough 
path to the left : and you cross a bridge that spans 
a fissure in the rock two hundred feet deep, where 
a little stream foams along. Now you stand beside 
the glacier of Rosenlaui : not large, but beautifully 
pure. A cave has been cut out for many yards into 
the beautiful blue ice ; and into it you go. It is a 
singular place in which to find yourself, that cave, 
or rather tunnel, in the solid ice. The air is cold, the 
floor is somewhat wet : a soft light comes through 
the ice from without. But there is no time to linger 
unduly: and we return down the rough slope to the 



384 From Saturday to Monday. 

spot, near the inn, where the guide and packhorse 
are waiting. Now upwards again, by a very muddy 
path through a long wood of pines. But gradually 
the pines cease, and the ground grows bare; till you 
enter on a tract where the snow lies some inches 
deep. Parched as are your hands and your tongue, 
there is a great temptation to refresh both with 
handfuls of that snow, which in a little while will 
leave you more parched than ever. But after no 
long climbing on the snow, you reach the summit 
of the Pass, 6,500 feet above the sea. Here you will 
find a little inn, the Steinbock ; where a simple but 
abundant repast awaits the travellers. Thirty or 
forty, almost all English, sit down to copious 
supplies of stewed chamois, washed down with 
prodigious draughts of thin claret. Here you rest an 
hour. And going out, you look at the Wetterhorn, 
which rises in a perpendicular wall of limestone 
rock, many thousand feet in height, beginning to 
rise apparently a hundred yards off. But your eye 
deceives you in this clear air and amid these tre- 
mendous magnitudes. The base of the precipice is 
more than a mile away. And when you begin to 
descend towards Grindelwald, the awful wall of 
rock seems to hang over you ; though nowhere you 
approach within a mile of it. It is not safe to go 
nearer: for every now and then you hear a tre- 
mendous roar; and looking towards the Wetterhorn, 
you see a mass of what looks like powdery snow 



From Saturday to Mojtday. 385 

sliding swiftly down the rock. You are astonished 
that so small a thing should make such a noise. 
But that is an avalanche ; and if you were nearer, 
you would know that what seemed powdery snow 
was indeed hundreds of tons of ice, in huge blocks 
and masses. And if a village of chalets had stood 
in the way, that slide of powdery snow would have 
swept it to destruction. 

It is a fact, well known to students of physical 
philosophy, that it is incomparably easier to go 
down a steep hill than to ascend one. This is a 
result of the great and beneficial law of Gravitation; 
according to which all material bodies tend towards 
the centre of the earth. And the consequence of 
this lav/ is, that when we set off to descend from 
this height, we do it very easily and rapidly. A 
horse, indeed, looks a poor and awkward figure 
scrambling down these paths : but if you have in 
your hands that long light tough stafT of ash shod 
with iron which is called an Alpen-Stock, you w^ill 
bound over the masses of rock at a great pace; 
doing things which in a less exhilarating air you 
would shrink from. All the way down, on the left, 
apparently close by, there is that awful wall of the 
Wetterhorn; and you may see other peaks, of which 
the most noticeable or at least the most memorable 
is the Schreckhorn. By-and-by, by the path, you 
may discern a man' standing beside a great square 
wooden box, like a small tub, fixed on a stake of 
C C 



386 From Saturday to Monday. 

wood four or five feet high. And when the travellers 
approach, the man will fit to that box a wooden 
pipe, eight feet long : and sticking his tongue into 
the lesser end of the pipe, will vehemently blow into 
it. That rude apparatus is the Alpine Horn, of 
which you have heard folk talk and sing. There is 
nothing specially attractive to the ear, in the few 
notes brayed forth : but what grand echoes, doubled 
and redoubled, are awakened up in the breast of 
that huge wall, and die away in the upper air and 
mountain ! Produce from your purse a liberal tip ; 
and ask the mountaineer to let you try his horn. 
You blow with all your might, like my friend Mac 
Puff sounding his own trumpet : but there is dead 
silence, as when to such as know him well Mac Puff 
does so sound : a feeble hissing of air from the 
great tub is all that rewards your labour. And one 
always respects a person who can do what one can- 
not do. Down along the slope ; till, turning a little 
way to the left, you approach the Upper Glacier of 
Grindelwald, filling up the great gulf between the 
Wetterhorn and the Schreckhorn. Into this glacier 
you enter, by an artificial tunnel: but the ice is 
dirty, and streams of water pour from it on your 
head. Thus you speedily retreat. Great belts of fir 
trees fringe the glacier ; which, like other glaciers, 
comes far below the snow-line. For as the ice 
which forms the glacier gradually melts away at 
the lower extremity next the valley, the ice from 



From Saturday to Monday. 387 

above presses on and fills its place. The glacier is 
in fact a slowly-advancing stream of ice. And all 
the glaciers are gradually retreating into the moun- 
tains, as increasing cultivation and population make 
the lower extremity melt away someAvhat faster 
than the waste can be supplied. Starting from 
far in the icy bosom of the Alps, in the region of 
perpetual snow, the Grindelwald glaciers come 
down to within a few yards of as green and rich 
grass as (if you were a cow) you would desire to 
eat. 

Now we Vv'alk for an hour through meadows In 
the valley ; pausing at a chalet to have some Alpine 
strawberries, small, and flavourless : and so at five 
o'clock on iMonday afternoon enter Grindelwald. 
The inns are filled with travellers ; but we are lucky 
in finding space at the Adler, whose windows look 
full on the Lower Glacier, at the distance of a 
mile. From a great black-looking cave at the end 
of the glacier, a river breaks away; of the dirty 
whity-brown water that comes from glaciers. It 
is a curious thing to see a river starting, full grown 
from the first. Look to the left of the lower end of 
the glacier; the ground meets the ice. Look to 
the right, and there a pretty big river, that looks as 
If It had burst out from the earth, is flowing away 
as if it had run a score of miles. 

Let the traveller refresh himself by much-needed 
ablution : they give you pretty large basins here. 



388 From Saturday to Monday. 

And then descending, sit down to dinner at the 
table-d'hote. A large party : almost all Germans. 
So are the waiters. Thus, if you express to a 
neighbour your conviction that something presented 
to you as chamois, is in truth a portion of a very 
tough and aged goat, no offence is given. 

Shall it be recorded how, after dinner, we sat in 
the twilight on a terrace hard by, looking at the 
glacier and the Alps : how, as it darkened down, we 
entered the dining-room again, and there beheld, 
seated at tea, a certain great Anglican prelate } 
Shall it be recorded how, if one had never seen nor 
heard of him before, you might have learned some- 
thing of his eloquence, geniality, and tact, tran- 
scending those of ordinary men, even from that hour 
and a half before he retired to rest 'i Shall it be 
recorded how, having begun to tell a story to his 
own party, he gradually and easily, as he discerned 
others listening with interest, addressed himself to 
them, till he ended his story in the audience of all 
in that large chamber 1 And shall it be recorded 
how two pretty young English girls sat and gazed 
with rapt and silent admiration on the great man's 
face } Two or three young fellows who had sought, 
during that day, to commend themselves to these 
fair beings, felt themselves (you could see) hope- 
lessly eclipsed and cut out ; and regarded the un- 
conscious Bishop with looks of fury. Happily, he 
did not know : so it did him no harm. 



From Saturday to Monday. 389 

My friend Mac Spoon recently dilated, in my 
hearing, on the advantages of Pocket Diaries ; 
which (as wise men know) are not records of pass- 
ing and past events, but memoranda of engage- 
ments. You note down in these, said he, all you 
have to do ; while yet if your book should be lost, 
and so fall into the hands of a stranger, he could 
not for his life understand the meaning of your 
inscriptions. Thus (he went on) you see how under 
the head of Thursday, April 32nd, 1864, I have 
marked Jericho, Train at 10*30. Now if tJiat were 
to fall into a stranger's possession, he could make 
nothing of it : he would not know what it meant 
at all. But as for me, the moment I look at it, I 
know that it means that on Thursday, April 32nd, 
1864, I am to go to Jericho by the I0"30 train. 
Such were the individual's words. And now, for 
the sake of those readers who could not under- 
stand that mysterious inscription, I think it expe- 
dient distinctly to declare, that the reason why this 
History is called From Saturday to Monday is, that 
it gives an account of historical events, beginning 
with Saturday and ending on Monday. And 
thus, having reached Monday evening (for soon 
after the Bishop's story, everybody went to bed), 
my task is done. It can never transpire, what 
happened on the Tuesday. Perhaps something hap- 
pened of great public interest. But if I were to 
record it here, then it would appear as if what 



390 From Saturday to Monday. 

occurred on Tuesday occurred between Saturday 
and Monday ; which is absurd. 

The remembrance of foreign travel is pleasanter 
than the travel itself For in remembrance there 
are none of the hosts that are dispelled by copious 
camphor: no wear of the muscles, nor of the lungs 
and heart : no eyes hot and blinded with the sun- 
shine on the snow ; no parched throat and leathery 
tongue; no old goat's flesh disguised as chamois 
venison. The little drawbacks are forgot ; but the 
absence of care and labour, the blue sky and the 
bright sun, glacier and cataract, and the snowy 
Alps remain. 







CHAPTER XVIII. 

CONCERNING THINGS WHICH CANNOT 
GO ON 




F course, In the full meaning of the words, 
Ben Nevis is one of the Things that can- 
not Go On. And among these, too, we 
may reckon the Pyramids. Likewise the unchanging 
ocean : and all the everlasting hills, which cannot 
be removed, but stand fast for ever. 

But it is not such things that I mean by the 
phrase : it is not such things that the phrase sug- 
gests to ordinary people. It is not things which 
are passing, indeed ; but passing so very slowly, 
and with so little sign as yet of their coming end, 
that to human sense they are standing still. I 
mean things which even we can discern have not 
the element of continuance in them : things which 
press it upon our attention as one of their most 
marked characteristics, that they have not the ele- 
ment of continuance In them. And you know 
there are such things. 



Things too good to last 



392 Coitcerning Things 

very long. Things too bad to be borne very long. 
Things which as you look at, you say to yourself, 
Ah, it is just a question of time ! We shall not have 
you long ! 

This, as it appears to me, my reader, is the essen- 
tial quality which makes us class anything among 
the Things which cannot Go On : it is that the thing 
should not merely be passing away, or even pass- 
ing away fast ; but that it shall bear on its very 
face, as the first thing that strikes us in looking at 
it, that it is so. There are passing things that have 
a sort of perennial look: things that will soon be 
gone, but that somehow do not press it upon us that 
they are going. If you had met Christopher North, 
in his days of affluent physical health, swinging 
along with his fishing-rod towards the Tweed, you 
might, if you had reflected, have thought that in 
truth all that could not go on. The day would 
come when that noble and loveable man would be 
very different : when he would creep along slowly, 
instead of tearing along with that springy pace : 
when he would no longer be able to thrash pugna- 
cious gipsies, nor to outleap flying tailors : when 
he would not sit down at morning in his dusty 
study, and rush through the writing of an article 
as he rushed through other things, impetuously, 
determinedly, and with marvellous speed, and 
hardly an intermission for rest : when mind and 
body, in brief, would be unstrung. But tliat was 



zvhich cannot Go On. 393 



not what you thought of, in the sight of that pro- 
digal strength and activity. At any rate, it was 
not the thought that came readiest. But when you 
see the deep colour on the cheek of a consumptive 
girl, and the too bright eye : when you see a man 
awfully overworking himself: when you see a 
human being wrought up to a frantic enthusiasm 
in some cause, good or bad : when you find a lady 
declaring that a recently-acquired servant, or a 
new-found friend, is absolute perfection : w^hen you 
see a church, crowded to discomfort, passages and 
all, by people who come to listen to its popular 
preacher: when you go to hear the popular 
preacher for yourself, and are interested and car- 
ried away by a sermon, evincing such elaborate 
preparation as no man, with the duty of a parish 
resting upon him, could possibly find time for in 
any single week, — and delivered with overwhelm- 
ing vehemence of voice and gesture : w^hen you hear 
of a parish in which a new-come clergyman has set 
a-going an amount of parochial machinery which 
it would need at least three and probably six clergy- 
men to keep working : w^hen you see a family, 
living a cat-and-dog life : when you see a poor 
fellow, crushed down by toil and anxiety, setting 
towards insanity : when you find a country gentle- 
man, with fifteen hundred a year, spending five 
thousand : when you see a man submitting to an in- 
sufferable petty tyranny, and commanding himself 



394 Concerning Things 

by a great effort, repeated several times a day, so 
far as not just yet to let fly at the tyrant's head : 
when you hear of King Bomba gagging and mur- 
dering his subjects, amid the reprobation of civilised 
mankind : when you see the stoker of an American 
steamer sitting upon his safety-valve, and observe 
that the indicator shows a pressure of a hundred 
and fifty pounds on the square inch of his boiler : 
— then, my friend, looking at such things as these, 
and beholding the end impending and the explosion 
imminent, you would say that these are Things 
which cannot Go On. 

And then, besides the fact that in the case of 
very many of the Things which cannot Go On, you 
can discern the cause at work that must soon bring 
them to an end ; there is a further matter to be 
considered. Human beings are great believers in 
what may be called the doctrine of Average. That 
is a deep conviction, latent in the ordinary mind, 
and the result of all its experience, that anything 
very extreme cannot last. If you are sitting on a 
winter evening in a chamber of a country house 
which, looks to the north-east ; and if a tremendous 
batter of wind and sleet suddenly dashes against the 
windows with a noise loud enough to attract the 
attention of everybody ; I am almost sure that the 
first thing that will be said, by somebody or other, 
in the first momentary lull in which it is possible to 
hear, will be, ' Well, that cannot last long.' We 



which cannot Go On. 395 

have in our minds, as regards all things moral and 
physical, some idea of what is the average state of 
matters : and whenever we find any very striking 
deviation from that, we feel assured that the de- 
viation will be but temporary. When you are 
travelling by railway, even through a new and 
striking country, the first few miles enable you to 
judge what you may expect. The country may be 
very different indeed from that which you are 
accustomed to see, day by day : but still, a little 
observation of it enables you to strike an average, 
so to speak, of that country. And if you come 
suddenly to anything especially remarkable : to 
some enormously lofty viaduct, whence you look 
down upon the tops of tall trees and upon a foam- 
ing stream : or to some tunnel through a huge hill : 
or to some bridge of singular structure : or to 
some tract wonderfully wooded or wonderfully 
bare: you involuntarily judge that all this is some- 
thing exceptional ; that it cannot last long ; that 
you will soon be through it, and back to the ordi- 
nary jog-trot way. 

And now, my friend, let me recall to mind certain 
facts connected with the great order of Things which 
cannot Go On : and let us compare our experience 
with regard to these. 

Have you a residence in the country, small or 
great? Have you ever had such a residence.'* If 
you have one, or ever have had one, I have no doubt 



39^ Concerning Things 

at all but there is or was a little gravelled walk, 
which you were accustomed often to walk up and 
down. You walked there, thinking of things pain- 
ful and things pleasant. And if nature and training 
made you the human being for a country life, you 
found that that little gravelled path could do you a 
great deal of good. When you went forth, some- 
what worried by certain of the little cares which 
worry at the time but are so speedily forgotten, 
and walked up and down ; you found that at each 
turn you took, the path, with its evergreens at 
either hand, and with here and there a little bay 
of green grass running into the thick masses of 
green boughs and leaves, gently pressed itself 
upon your attention ; a patient friend, content to 
wait your time. And in a little space, no matter 
whether in winter or in summer, the path with its 
belongings filled your mind with pleasant little 
thoughts and cares ; and smoothed your forehead 
and quieted your nervous system. I am a great 
believer in grass and evergreens and gravelled 
walks. Was it not pleasant, when a bitter wind 
was blowing outside your little realm, to walk in 
the shelter of the yews and hollies, where the air 
felt so snug and calm : and now and then to look 
out beyond your gate, and catch the bitter East on 
your face, and then turn back again to the warm, 
sheltered walk ! Beautiful in frost, beautiful in 
snow, beautiful in rain, beautiful in sunshine, are 



which cannot Go On. 397 

clumps of evergreens : is green grass : and cheerful 
and healthful to our whole moral nature is the 
gravelled walk that winds between ! 

But all this is by the way. It is not of gravelled 
walks in general that I am to speak : but of one 
special phenomenon concerning such walks ; and 
bearing upon my proper subject. If you are walk- 
ing up and down a path, let us say a hundred and 
fifty yards long, talking to a friend, or holding con- 
versation with yourself; and if at each turn you 
take, you have to bend your head to pass under an 
overhanging bough : here is what will happen. To 
bend your head for once, will be no effort. You 
will do it instinctively, and never think about the 
matter. To stoop even six times, will not be 
much. But if you walk up and down for an hour, 
that constant evading of the overhanging bough 
will become intolerably irksome. For a little, it is 
nothing: but you cannot bear it if it is a thing 
that is to go on. Here is a fact in human nature. 
You can stand a very disagreeable and painful 
thing for once : or for a little while. But a very 
small annoyance, going on unceasingly, grows in- 
sufferable. No annoyance can possibly be slighter, 
than that a drop of cold water should fall upon 
your bare head. But you are aware that those 
ingenious persons, who have investigated the con- 
stitution of man with the design to discover the 
sensitive places where man can feel torture, have 



39^ Concerning Things 

discovered what can be got out of that falHng drop 
of water. Continue it for an hour ; continue it 
for a day : and it turns to a refined agony. It is a 
thing which cannot go on long, without driving the 
sufferer mad. No one can say what the effect 
might be, of compelHng a human being to spend a 
week, walking, through all his waking hours, in 
a path where he had to bend his head to escape 
a branch every minute or so. You, my reader, did 
not ascertain by experiment what would be the 
effect. However pretty the branch might be, 
beneath which you had to stoop, or round which 
you had to dodge, at every turn ; that branch 
must go. And you cut away the blossoming apple- 
branch : you trained in another direction the spray 
of honeysuckle : you sawed off the green bough, 
beautiful with the soft beechen leaves. They had 
become things which you could not suffer to go on. 
Have you ever been misled into living in your 
house, during any portion of the time in which it 
was being painted .? If so, you remember how you 
had to walk up and down stairs on planks, very 
steep and slippery : how, at early morning, a sound 
pervaded the dwelling, caused by the rubbing your 
doors with stones, to the end of putting a smoother 
surface upon the doors : how your children had to 
abide in certain apartments under ground, to be 
beyond the reach of paint, and brushes, and walls 
still wet. The discomfort was extreme. You 



which ca7i7iot Go On. 399 

could not have made up your mind to go on 
through life, under the like conditions : but you 
bore it patiently, because it was not to go on. It 
was as when you shut your eyes, and squeeze 
through a thicket of brambles, encouraged by the 
hope of reaching the farther side. So when you 
are obliged to ask a man to dinner, with whom you 
have not an idea or sympathy in common. Sup- 
pressing the tendency to yawn, you force yourself 
to talk about things in which you have not the 
faintest interest : and you know better than to say 
a word upon the subjects for which you really care. 
You could not stand this : were it not that from 
time to time you furtively glance at the clock, and 
think that the time of deliverance is drawing near. 
And on the occasion of a washing-day, or a change 
of cook, you put up without a murmur with a din- 
ner to which you could not daily subdue your 
heart. We can go on for a little space, carried by 
the impetus previously got, and by the hope of 
what lies before us. It is like the dead points in 
the working of a steam-engine. You probably 
know that many river steamboats have but a single 
engine : and that there are two points, each reached 
every few seconds, at which a single engine has no 
power at all. The paddle-wheels continue to turn, 
in virtue of the strong impetus already given them. 
Now, it is plain to every mind, that if the engine 
remained for any considerable period at the point 



400 Concerning Things 

where it is absolutely powerless, the machinery 
driven by the engine would stop. But in practice, 
the difficulty is very small : because it is but for a 
second or two that the engine remains in this state 
of paralysis. It does quite well for a Httle : but is 
a state that could not go on. 

Any very extreme feeling, in a commonplace 
mind, is a thing not likely to go on long. Very 
extravagant likes and dislikes : very violent grief, 
such as people fancy must kill them : will, in most 
cases, endure not long. In short, anything that 
flies in the face of the laws which regulate the 
human mind : anything which is greatly opposed 
to Nature's love for the Average : cannot, in gene- 
ral, go on. I do not forget, that there are striking 
exceptions. There are people, who never quite get 
over some great grief or disappointment : there 
are people who form a fixed resolution, and hold 
by it all through life. I have seen more than 
one or two men and women, w^hose whole soul and 
energy were so devoted to some good work, that 
a stranger, witnessing their doings for a few days, 
and hearing their talk, would have said, ' TJiat 
cannot last. It must soon burn itself out, zeal 
like that ! ' But if you had made enquiry, you 
would have learned that all tJiat had gone on un- 
flagging, for ten, twenty, thirty years. There 
must have been sound and deep principle there at 
the first, to stand the wear of such a time : and 



which cannot Go On. 401: 

you may well believe that the whole nature is now 
confirmed irretrievably in the old habit ; you may 
well hope that the good Christian and philanthro- 
pist who has gone on for thirty years, will go on 
as long as he lives ; — will go on for ever. But, as 
a general rule, I have no great faith in the stabi- 
lity of human character : and I have great faith 
in the law of Average. People will not go on very 
long, doing what is inconvenient for them to do. 
And I will back Time against most feelings and 
most resolutions in human hearts. It will beat 
them in the end. You are a clergyman, let us 
suppose. Your congregation are fond of your ser- 
mons. They have got into your way : and if so, 
they probably like to hear you preach, better than 
anybody else; unless it be the two or three very 
great men. A family, specially attached to you, 
moves from • a house near the church, to another 
two or three miles away. They tell you, that 
nothing shall prevent their coming to their accus- 
tomed places every Sunday still : they would come, 
though the distance were twice as great. They 
are perfectly sincere. But your larger experience 
of such cases makes you well aware that time, and 
distance, and mud, and rain, and hot sunshine, 
will beat them. Coming to church over that in- 
convenient distance, is a thing that cannot go on. 
It is a thing that ought not to go on : and you 
make up your mind to the fact. You cannot 
D D 



402 Concerning Things 

-vanquish the laws of Nature. You may make water 
run up hill, by laborious pumping. But you can- 
not go on pumping for ever: and whenever the 
water is left to its own nature, it will certainly 
run down hill. All such declarations as ' I shall 
never forget you : ' * I shall never cease to deplore 
your loss : ' ' I can never hold up my head again : ' 
may be ethically true: but time will prove them 
logically false. The human being may be quite 
sincere in uttering them : but he will change his 
jnind. 

I do not mean to say that it is very pleasant to 
have to think thus : or that much good can come 
of dwelling too long upon the idea. It is a very 
chilling and sorrowful thing, to be reminded of 
all this in the hard, heartless way in which some 
old people like to drive the sad truth into the 
young. It is very fit and right that the girl of 
twenty, broken-hearted now because the young 
individual she is fond of is gone off to Australia, 
should believe that when he returns in five years 
he will find her unchanged : and should resent 
the remotest suggestion that by that time she will 
probably think and feel quite differently. It is 
fit and right that she should do all this, even 
though a prescient eye could discern that in two 
years exactly she will be married to somebody 
else : and married, too, not to some old hunx of 
great wealth whom her parents have badgered her 



which cannot Go On. 403 

into marrying against her will ; but (much worse 
for the man in Australia, who has meanwhile taken 
to drinking) married with all her heart to some 
fine 'young fellow, very suitable in age and all 
other respects. Yet, certain though the general 
principle may be, a wise and kind man or woman 
will not take much pleasure in imparting the sad 
lesson, taught by experience, to younger hearts. 
No good can come of doing so. Bide your time, 
my friend : and the laws of nature will prevail. 
Water will not long run up hill. But while the 
stream is quite happy and quite resolute in flow- 
ing up an incline of one in twenty, there is no 
good in standing by it, and in roaring out that in 
a little while it will get tired of that. Experience 
tells us several things, which are not quite to the 
credit of our race : and it is wrong to chill a hope- 
ful and warm heart with these. We should be 
delighted to find that young heart falsifying them 
by its own history : let it do so if it can. 

And it is chilling and irritating to be often re- 
minded of the refrigerating power of Time upon 
all warm feelings and resolutions. I have known a 
young clergyman, appointed early in life to his first 
parish ; and entering upon his duty with tremendous 
zeal. I think a good man, however old, would re- 
joice at such a sight : would delightedly try to 
direct and counsel all that hearty energy, and to 
turn all that labour to the best account. And even 



404 Concerning Things 

if he thought within himself that possibly all this 
might not quite last, I don't think he would go and 
tell the young minister so. And the aged man 
would thankfully remember, that he has known 
instances in which all that has lasted ; and would 
hope that in this instance it might last again. But 
I have known a cynical, heartless, time-hardened old 
man (the uncle, in fact, of my friend Mr. Snarling), 
listen with a grin of mingled contempt and malig- 
nity to the narration of the young parson's doings ; 
and explain the whole phenomena by a general 
principle, inexpressibly galling and discouraging to 
the young parson. ^ Oh,' says the cynical, heartless 
old individual, ' new brooms sweep clean ! ' That 
was all. The whole thing was explained and settled. 
I should like to apply a new knout to the old indi- 
vidual, and see if it would cut smartly. 

And then we are to remember, that though it be 
only a question of time with the existence of any- 
thing, that does not prove that the thing is of no 
value. A great part of all that we are enjoying, con- 
sists of Things which cannot Go On. And though 
the wear that there is in a thing be a great consider- 
ation in reckoning its worth ; and more especially, 
in the case of all Christian qualities, be the great 
test whether or not they are genuine ; yet things 
that are going, and going very fast, have their 
worth. And it is very fit that we should enjoy 
them while they last ; without unduly overclouding 



which cannot Go On. 405 

our enjoyment of them by the recollection of their 
evanescence. ^Why,' said an eminent divine, — 
' why should we pet and pamper these bodies of 
ours, which are soon to be reduced to a state of 
mucilaginous fusion ?' There was a plausibility 
about the question : and for about half a minute 
it tended to make you think, that it might be 
proper to leave off taking your daily bath, and 
brushing your nails and teeth : likewise that instead 
of patronising your tailor any further, it might be 
well to assume a horse-rug : and also that it might 
be unworthy to care for your dinner, and that for 
the future you should live on raw turnips. But of 
course, anything that revolts common sense, can 
never be a part of Christian doctrine or duty. And 
the natural reply to the rhetorical question I have 
quoted would of course be, that after these mortal 
frames are so fused, we shall wholly cease to care 
for them : but that meanwhile we shall suitably 
tend, feed, and clothe them, because it is comfort- 
able to do so ; because it is God's manifest inten- 
tion that we should do so : because great moral and 
spiritual advantage comes of our doing so : and 
because you have no more right to disparage and 
neglect your wonderful mortal frame, than any other 
talent or gift confided to you by God. Why should 
we neglect, or pretend to neglect, these bodies of 
ours, with which we are commanded to glorify God : 
which are bought with Christ's blood : which, even 



4o6 Concerning Things 

through the last lowliness of mortal dissolution, 
even when turned to dust again, are ' still united to 
Christ :' and which are to rise again in glory and 
beauty, and be the redeemed soul's companion 
through eternity? And it is a mere sophism to 
put the shortness of a thing's continuance, as a 
reason Vv^hy it should not be cared for while it lasts. 
Of course, if it last but a short time, all the shorter 
will be the time through which we shall care for it. 
But let us make the best of things while they last : 
both as regards our care for them and our enjoy- 
ment of them. 

That a thing will soon be done with : that the 
cloud will soon blow by : is a good reason for bear- 
ing patiently what is painful. But it is very need- 
less to thrust in this consideration, to the end of 
spoiling the enjoyment of what is pleasant. I have 
seen people, when a little child, in a flutter of 
delighted anticipation, was going away to some 
little merrymaking, anxious to put down its un- 
seemly happiness by severely impressing the fact, 
that in a very few hours all the pleasure would be 
over, and lessons would begin again. And I have 
seen, with considerable wrath, a cloud descend 
upon the little face at the unwelcome suggestion. 
What earthly good is to come of this piece of stupid, 
well-meant malignity } It originates, doubtless, in 
that great fundamental belief in many narrow minds, 
that the more uncomfortable you are, the likelier 



which cannot Go On. 407 

you are to be right : and that God is angr}- when 
he sees people happy. Unquestionably, most of 
the little enjoyments of life are very transient. All 
pleasant social gatherings : all visits to cheerful 
country houses : all holidays : are things which 
cannot go on. Xo doubt, that is true : but that is 
no reason why we should sulkily refuse to enjoy 
them while they last. There is no good end 
secured, by persisting in seeing * towers decayed 
as soon as built.' It is right, always latently, and 
sometimes expressly, to rem.ember that they must 
decay: but meanwhile, let us be thankful for their 
shelter and their beauty. Sit down, happily, on a 
July day, beneath the green shade of your beeches : 
do not needlessly strain what little imagination you 
have, to picture those branches leafless, and the 
winter wind and clouds racking overhead. Enjoy 
your parcel of new books when it comes, coming 
not often : cut the leaves peacefully, and welcome 
in each volume a new companion : then carefully 
decide the fit place on your shelves Avhere to dis- 
pose the pleasant accession to your store : and do 
not worry yourself by the reflection that when you 
die, the little library you collected may perhaps 
be scattered ; and the old, friendly-looking volumes 
fall into no one knows whose hands : perhaps be 
set forth on out-door bookstalls ; or be exhibited 
on the top of a wall, with a sack put over them 
when it begins to rain, as in a place which I have 



4o8 Concerning Things 

seen. ^ What is the use of washing my hands ?' said 
a httle boy in my hearing : '■ they will very soon be 
dirty again ! ' Refuse, my reader, to accept the 
principle implied in the little boy's words : however 
specious it may seem. Whitewash your manse, if 
you be a Scotch minister, some time in April : 
paint your house in town, however speedily it may 
again grow black. Write your sermons diligently : 
write them on the very best paper you can get, and 
in a very distinct and careful hand : and pack them 
with attention in a due receptacle. It is, no doubt, 
only a question of time how long they will be 
needed, before the day of your departure shall 
make them no more than waste paper. Yet, 
though things which cannot go on, you may hope 
to get no small use out of them, to others and to 
yourself, before the time when the hand that tra- 
velled over the pages shall be cold with the last 
chill ; and the voice that spoke these words shall 
be hushed for ever. We know, obscurely, what we 
shall come to : and by God's grace we are content, 
and we hope to be prepared : but there is no need 
to overcast all life with the ceaseless anticipation of 
death. You may have read how John Hampden's 
grave was opened, at the earnest desire of an ex- 
tremely fat nobleman who was his injudicious ad- 
mirer. The poor wreck of humanity was there : 
and, as the sexton said, * We propped him up with 
a shovel at his back, and I cut off a lock of his 



which cannot Go On. 409 

hair.' I hold with Abraham, who ' buried his dead 
from his sight ; ' I hold with Shakspeare, who 
desired that no one should disturb him in his lowly 
bed, till He shall awaken him whose right it is to 
do so. Yet I read no lesson of the vanity of 
Hampden's life, in that last sad picture of help- 
lessness and humiliation. He had come to that : 
yet all this does not show that his life was not a 
noble one while it lasted, though now^ it was done. 
He had his day : and he used it : whether well or 
ill let wiser men judge. And if it be right to say 
that he withstood tyranny, and helped to lay the 
foundation of his country's liberties, the whim of 
Lord Nugent and the propping up with the shovel 
can take nothing away from that. 

You understand me, my friend. You know the 
kind of people who revenge themselves upon human 
beings who meanwhile seem happy, by suggesting 
the idea that it cannot last. You see Mr, A., de- 
lighted with his beautiful new church : you know 
how Miss B. thinks the man to whom she is to be 
married next week, the handsomest, wisest, and 
best of mankind : you behold the elation of Mr. C. 
about that new pair of horses he has got : and if 
you be a malicious blockhead, you may greatly 
console yourself in the spectacle of the happiness 
of those individuals, by reflecting, and perhaps by 
saying, that it is all one of those things that cannot 



4IO Concerning Things 

go on. Mr. A. will in a few months find no end of 
worry about that fine building : Miss B.'s husband, 
at present transfigured to her view, will settle into 
the very ordinary being he is : and Mr. C.'s horses 
will prove occasionally lame, and one of them a 
permanent roarer. Yet I think a wise man may 
say, I am aware I cannot go on very long ; yet I 
shall do my best in my little time. I look at the 
right hand which holds my pen. The pen will last 
but for a short space ; yet that is no reason why I 
should slight it now. The hand may go on longer. 
Yet, warm as it is now, and faithfully obeying my 
will as it has done through all those years, the day 
is coming when it must cease from its long labours. 
And, for myself, I am well content that it should 
be so. Let us not strive against the silent cur- 
rent, that bears us all away and away. Let us 
not quarrel with the reminders we meet on many 
country gravestones, addressed to us who are living 
from the fathers who have gone before. Yet you 
will think of Charles Lamb. He said (but nobody 
can say when Elia meant what he said), ' I conceive 
disgust at those impertinent and unbecoming fami- 
liarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. 
Every dead man must take upon himself to be 
lecturing me with his odious truism, that " Such aa 
he now is I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, 
perhaps as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am 
alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. 
Know thy betters ! ' 



which cannot Go On. 4 1 1 

You may look on somewhat farther, in a sweet 
country burying-place. Dear old churchyard, once 
so familiar : with the old oaks and the gliding river, 
and the purple hills looking over : where the true 
heart of Jeanie Deans has mouldered into dust : I 
wonder what you are looking like to-day ! Many 
a time have I sat, in the quiet summer day, on a 
flat stone : and looked at the green graves : and 
thought that they were Things that could not Go 
On ! There were the graves of my predecessors : 
the day would come when old people in the parish 
would talk, not unkindly, of the days, long ago, 
when some one was minister whose name is neither 
here nor there. But it was a much stranger thing 
to think, in that silent and solitary place, of the 
great stir and bustle there shall be in it some day ! 
Here it has been for centuries: the green mossy 
stones and the little grassy undulations. But we 
know, from the best of all authority, that * the 
hour is coming ' which shall make a total change. 
This quiet, this decay, this forgetfulness, are not to 
Go on ! 

We look round, my reader, on all our possessions, 
and all our friends : and we discern that there are 
the elements of change in all. ' I am content to 
stand still,' says Elia, 'at the age to which I am 
arrived : I, and my friends : to be no younger, no 
richer, no handsomer : I do not want to be weaned 
by age ; or drop, like mellow fruit, into the grave.' 



412 Concerning Things 

There are indeed moods of mind, in which all 
thoughtful men have possibly yielded to a like 
feeling : but I never heard but of one other man 
whose deliberate wish was just to go on in this 
round of life for ever. Yet, though content to be 
in the wise and kind hands in which we are, we 
feel it strange to find how all things are going. 
Your little children, my friend, are growing older : 
growing out of their pleasant and happy child- 
hood : the old people round you are wrinkling up, 
and breaking down. And in your constitution, in 
your way of life, there are things which cannot go 
on. There is some little physical malady, always 
rather increasing: and you cannot always be en- 
larging the doses of the medicine that is to correct 
it, or the opiates which make you sleep. I confess, 
with sorrow, that when I see an extraordinarily 
tidy garden, or a man dressed with special trim- 
ness, I cannot help looking forward to a day when 
all that is to cease : when the man will be some- 
what slovenly ; when the garden w411 be somewhat 
weedy. I think especially of the garden : and the 
garden which comes most home to me is the manse 
garden. It was a marvel of exquisite neatness and 
order: but a new minister comes, who does not 
care for gardening : and all that goes. And though 
rejoicing greatly to see a parish diligently worked, 
yet sometimes I behold the parochial machinery 
driven with such a pressure of steam, that I cannot 



which cannot Go On. 



but think it never will last. I have known men 
who never could calmly think : who lived in a hurry 
and a fever. There are places where it costs a 
constant effort, not always a successful effort, to 
avoid coming to such a life : but let us strive 
against it. Let us not have constant push, and ex- 
citement, and high pressure. I hate to feel a whirl 
around me, as of a huge cotton mill. Let us * study 
to be quiet!' And I have observed that clergymen 
who set that feverish machinery a-going, generally 
find it expedient to get away from it as speedily as 
may be, so as to avoid the discredit of its breaking 
down in their hands : being well aware that it is 
a thing which cannot go on. We cannot always 
go at a tearing gallop, with every nerve tense. 
Probably we are doing so, a great deal too much. 
If so, let us definitely moderate our pace, before 
the pace kills us. 

^ It's a long lane that has no turning/ says the 
proverb, testifying to the depth of human belief 
in the Average : testifying to our latent conviction 
that anything very marked is not likely to go on. 
A great many people, very anxious and unhappy 
and disappointed, cherish some confused hope that 
surely all this has lasted so long, things must be 
going to mend. The night has been so long, that 
morning must be near : even though there be not 
the least appearance of the dawn as yet. If you 
have been a briefless barrister, or an unemployed 



414 Things which cannot Go On. 

physician, or an unbeneficed clergyman, for a pretty 
long time ; even though there be no apparent reason 
now, more than years since, why success should 
come, you are ready to think that surely it must 
be coming now, at last. It seems to be overdue, by 
the theory of Average. Yet it is by no means certain 
that there is a good time coming, because the bad 
time has lasted long. Still, it is sometimes so. I 
have known a man, very laborious, very unfortunate, 
with whom everything failed : and after some years 
of this, I have seen a sudden turn of fortune come. 
And with exactly the same merit and the same 
industry as before, I have beheld him succeed in 
all he attempted, and gain no small eminence and 
reputation. ' It behoved him to dree his weird,' as 
was said by Meg Merrilies: and then the good 
time came. If you are happy, my reader, I wish 
your happiness may last. And if you are mean- 
while somewhat down and depressed, let us hope 
that all this may prove one of the Things which 
cannot Go On ! 



CONCL US ION. 




T is the way of Providence, in most cases, 
gradually to wean us from the things 
which we must learn to resign. And it 
las been so with this holiday-time, now all but 
ended. It is not now what it was when we came 
here. The leaves wore their summer green when 
we came : now they have faded into autumn russet 
and gold. The paths are strewn deep with those 
that have fallen ; and even in the quiet sunshiny 
afternoon, some bare trees look wintry against the 
sky. Like the leaves, the holiday-time has faded. 
It is outgrown. The appetite for work has revived : 
and all of us now look forward with as fresh interest 
to going back to the city to work, as we once did 
to coming away from the city to rest and play. 

We have been weaned, by slow degrees. Nature 
is hedging us in. The days are shortening fast : 
the breeze strikes chill in the afternoons, as they 
darken. The sea sometimes feels bitter, even 
though you enter it head foremost. Nor have 



41 6 • Conclusion. 



there lacked days of ceaseless rain, and of keen 
north wind. Two lighthouses, one casting fitful 
flashes across the water, and one burning with a 
steady light, become great features of the scene by 
seven o'clock in the evening. A little later, there 
is a line of lights that stretches for miles at the 
base of the dark hills along the opposite shore : 
indoor occupations have supplanted evening walks. 
Yet a day or two, and those lights will no more be 
seen. The inhabitants of the dwellings they make 
visible will have returned to the great city; and 
very many of the pretty cottages and houses will 
remain untenanted through the long winter-time. 

As these last days are passing, one feels the 
vague remorse which is felt when most things draw 
to an end. One feels as if we might have made 
more of this time of quiet amid these beautiful 
hills. Surely we ought to have enjoyed the place 
and the time more! Thus we are disposed to 
blame ourselves ; but to blame ourselves unjustly. 
You would be aware of the like tendency, parting 
from almost anything; no matter how much you 
had made of it. You will know the vague remorse 
when dear friends die, thinking you ought to have 
been kinder to them : you will know it, though you 
did for them all that could be done by mortal. And 
when you come to die, my friend, looking back on 
the best-spent life, you will think how differently 
you would spend it were it to be spent again : you 



Conchtsion. 417 



will feel as if your talent had been very poorly 
occupied. And doubtless with good reason, here. 

Last night, there was a magnificent sunset. You 
saw the great red ball above the mountains, visibly 
going down. It was curious, to watch the space 
between the sun and the dark ridge beneath it 
lessening moment by moment, till the sun slowly 
sunk from sight. Of course, he had been approach- 
ing his setting just as fast all day, as in those last 
minutes above the horizon; but there was some- 
thing infinitely more striking about the very end. 
At broad noonday, it is not so easy to fully take in 
the great truth which Dr. Johnson had engraved on 
the dial of his watch, that he might be often re- 
reminded of it, — the solemn Nu0 yap sp^srcn. It is 
in the last minutes that we are made to think that 
we ought to have valued the sun more when we 
had him ; and valued more the day he measured 
out. 

Day by day this volume has grown up through 
this holiday-time. In its earlier portion, the author 
diligently revised the chapters you have read. 
And by-and-by, the leisurely postman brought the 
daily pages of pleasing type, in which things look 
so different from what they look in the cramped 
magazine printing. Great is the enjoyment which 
antique ornaments and large initial letters afford to 
a simple mind. 

E E 



41 8 Conclusion. 



And now it is the forenoon of our last day here : 
we go early to-morrow morning. Play-time is past ; 
and work-time is to begin. I hear voices outside, 
and the pattering of little feet : there are the sea 
and the hills ; and all the place is pervaded by the 
sound of the waves. On no day through our time 
here, did the place look as it does now : it wears the 
peculiar aspect which comes over places from which 
you are parting. How fast the holidays have 
slipped away ! And what a beautiful scene this 
is 1 What a pretty little Gothic church it is, in 
which for these Sundays that are gone the writer 
has taken part of the duty : how green the ivy 
on the cliffs, and the paths through the woods; 
what perpetual life in that ceaseless fluctuation of 
which you seldom lose sight for long ! But we 
must all set our faces to the months of work once 
more, thankful to feel fit for them : not without 
some anxiety in the prospect of them ; looking for 
the guidance and help of that kindest Hand which 
has led through the like before. 



LONDON 

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